'A review of user guidance techniques to enable "inclusive" systems engineering for domain experts

Abstract

With the ever-increasing assistance of technology in most, if not all, industries the concept of modeling systems and systems engineering becomes ever more important. However, meeting the needs of domain experts in different fields is challenging. Enabling domain experts to model and build systems themselves would reduce the possibility of miscommunication and number of needs not met by a system.Systems Engineering is defined by INCOSE as: “Systems Engineering is a transdisciplinary and integrative approach to enable the successful realization, use, and retirement of engineered systems, using systems principles and concepts, and scientific, technological and management methods.” However, the transdisciplinary aspect clashes with domain experts who are inapt in regards of systems engineering, as it needs special training and requires the understanding of complex core concepts. This results in domain experts needing to communicate their needs to systems engineers, who are supposed to build systems satisfying these needs. However, such needs can easily be miscommunicated, leading to systems not meeting the requirements and time, money and effort being wasted. This would be reduced if the domain experts themselves were able to build or model these systems themselves. Aim and Novelty: Therefore, we suggest to move towards a more inclusive systems engineering process which focuses on specifically guiding users through the systems engineering process, reducing the need of special training.Guiding users has been researched in many different fields, not only in regards of psychology and social sciences, but also in computer science in particular. Digital nudging, persuasive systems, user-centric UI design, recommender systems and gamification all aim to guide a user towards certain decisions or making tools easier to use. These fields have been researched mostly as independent fields with similar goals but in different context. In order to create inclusive systems engineering tools it is important to incorporate and understand these fields to guide the user through the systems engineering process. Methodology: In order to examine similarities and identify areas where one guidance technique might be lacking and thus profiting from the use of another technique the state-of-the-art literature is reviewed. In order to identify applicable literature a search for the keywords “Gamification; Nudging; recommender system; persuasive system; user guidance; user experience and user motivation” has been done.These where screened on their relevancy to user guidance and motivation, as well as their use of techniques applicable in a software engineering process. Conclusion: This paper introduces the concept of inclusive systems engineering. Focusing on user guidance this paper gives an overview on state-of-the-art techniques, examined similarities as well as areas where different techniques can complement each other. This paper aims to provide an overview of current user guidance techniques in order to provide a starting point to move systems engineering into a more inclusive direction that can be done not only by experts in systems engineering but also domain experts in order to reduce the potential of misunderstanding when domain experts need to specify their needs to systems engineering experts in order to realize and use new systems.