Are software companies aware of UX?

The efforts of addressing user experience (UX) in product development keeps growing, as demonstrated by the proliferation of workshops and conferences bringing together academics and practitioners, who aim at creating interactive software able to satisfy their users. Unfortunately, human-centred design and methods addressing usability and UX are always mentioned in research papers but yet very seldom applied in the current practice of software development in industry. In this paper, some findings of studies we have recently performed with software companies are reported. They show that either companies still neglect usability and UX, or they do not properly address them. Thus, in this workshop that seems to consider UX evaluation as a usual practice and aims to optimize the impact of UX evaluation feedback on software development, our provocative statement is: Are software companies (at least) aware of UX? The studies summarized in this paper show that, in many cases, the answer is NO. We are working to overcome the current situation and the paper concludes by providing some suggestions to fill the gap between research and practice of UX.