Conflicts Between UX Designers, Front-End and Back-End Software Developers: Good or Bad for Productivity?

Modern software development processes side traditional development activities with user experience design, i.e. the process of designing software systems supporting and improving user interactions through the fulfilment of quality properties of the software systems such as usability, usefulness, and desirability. Commonly, developers and user experience designers have rather different backgrounds. Several researches have identified this difference as pivotal for the rising of miscommunication and conflicts, that may theoretically undermine productivity of the software development process. In this research, we investigated the kinds of conflict that are more likely to arise between developers and user experience designers. Besides, we analysed whether socio-cultural factors and geographic distribution of team members affect the rising of conflicts. Eventually, we related the presence of conflicts to the success of a software development project. We conducted this research as a questionnaire-based survey involving 56 professional software developers and user experience designers from various countries in Europe. The collected data showed that the most common type of conflict is task conflict. Age, gender and geographical distribution of team members do not affect the rising of conflicts. Conflicts are surprisingly perceived as beneficial for productivity in software development processes in several cases, although they led to the failure of projects in the 10.9% of the cases.