Extending the Rational Unified Process with a User Experience Discipline: a Case Study

The Rational Unified process is widely used as a process frameworkfor software development. The introduction and use of the RUP is not straightforward. Experience and research have shown that some sort of tailoring ofRUP to the software development organization and the software developmentprojects is necessary to be able to use the framework in a productive way in theprojects. In this paper we describe software development in an organizationwith high focus on the user experience aspects and user interface design in theirprojects. This organization did tailor RUP to its types of projects by adding auser experience discipline. An evaluation of two development projects usingthis tailored RUP was done by the means of Post Mortem analyses conductedby external researchers. The main conclusison is that RUP needs to be tailoredto be able to support the design of user experience oriented issues, and that theRUP structure is suited for doing so.