Towards the UX Support to Software Startups: On the relationship of professional expertise and UX work in the Brazilian scenario☆

One of the topics that can help startups create a more assertive product is User eXperience (UX). Recent research has dedicated efforts to investigate factors that support and hinder the application of UX practices in software startups. The expertise of the professional who applies UX practices is cited as one of that factors; however, its relationship to the application of practices and challenges remains a topic that needs investigation. This study aims to analyze the relationship between the UX expertise of professionals from Brazilian software startups and UX practices' application. A survey was conducted with software startups (N = 90). We performed a descriptive analysis to answer the research questions and applied Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to check the relationship between variables. Thus, we verified that most software startups do not have a UX professional, and those who apply UX practices are the CEO or developers. We also found a relationship between challenges related to lack of experience, bias in applying practices, and obtaining valuable results with the lack of a UX professional. Finally, the MCA technique showed that some challenges are independent of professional expertise, such as difficulty identifying users to participate in practices and limited resources.