UXUP — User eXperience Centric Unified Process

User eXperience (UX) and at a higher level, Customer eXperience (CX) are trending topics in the industry. More than ever, many businesses and corporations have realized that their success in growing their user base and revenue is dependent on creating a good customer and user experience through their services and products. However, traditional systems development methods and life cycle models have not had their focus on user/customer experience and with the most recent application development frameworks and possibilities to spin up rapid serverless cloud-based APIs, opportunities exist to almost entirely separate the front-end and back-end development concerns. Such a separation implies a different development paradigm, which traditional methods have not addressed completely. This paper proposes a novel systems development life cycle model that integrates UX-related practices into the development process and postpones the back-end development to begin once the maturity of a prototype with enriched user experience is achieved. The proposed method has been evaluated by a community of practice in a case study which shows the success of the proposed method in a number of areas like separation of concerns, agility, and the perceived level of user experience.