Abstract:

Software startups focus on developing innovative products or services, often disruptive and in challenging contexts. These companies distinguish themselves by seeking a scalable, repeatable, and profitable business model with the aim of growing in the market. They typically operate with a small team of professionals, explore new technologies, and are characterized by rapid evolution and high uncertainty about customers and market conditions. In these conditions, technology-based startups require studies on specific and appropriate software engineering practices tailored to their characteristics. Some studies highlight user experience (UX) as a critical factor for technology-based startups, generating value for users and creating a competitive advantage. Recently, user experience (UX) has become a topic of interest for software teams in startups. However, software and UX professionals work to combine UX practices into development activities, partly due to the lack of resources in startups.

Within this context, this article presents two complementary approaches to improving product development in technology-based startups through the integration of User Experience (UX) techniques. This is based on methodologies, frameworks, and concepts such as Customer Development, Lean Startup, Scrum, and User Experience, to assist new entrepreneurs in applying a viable technology product development process. The first part details the integration of UX techniques into the requirements elicitation and analysis process, which is fundamental to ensuring that the product meets users' needs and expectations. The stages include user research, persona creation, user journey mapping, requirements definition and prioritization, prototyping and usability testing, agile development integration, and continuous iteration. These practices aim to transform UX insights into clear and prioritized requirements, validate and refine the design through prototyping and usability testing, and promote a culture of continuous improvement based on user feedback.

The proposed process integrates customer development practices, providing the entrepreneur with techniques to understand the market and the needs of the product's customer segment with Scrum practices. The process proposes an alteration to the product development lifecycle so that entrepreneurs can produce more quickly, using fewer resources progressively. This alteration primarily affects the requirements analysis/customer creation phase.

The second part of this article describes a pedagogical proposal structured into five modules: Introduction to UX, User Research, Design and Prototyping, Development and Implementation, and Measurement and Optimization. This proposal aims to empower multidisciplinary teams to create user-centered products, combining theoretical classes, practical workshops, case studies, and mentoring sessions. The objective is to develop a solid foundation of knowledge and practical skills to incorporate UX into the development process. By combining robust theoretical training with the practical application of UX techniques, this integrated approach seeks to empower technology-based startups to develop innovative, efficient, and user-centered products, increasing their chances of success in the competitive market. This pedagogical practice was developed to be applied in the Samsung Ocean startup training program.

Keywords:

Startups, Software, User Experience.