Designing Decision Aids for Digital Service Design Technique Selection

Abstract

Today, people from a multi-disciplinary background are becoming involved in digital service design processes. With the increasing number of digital service design processes in organizations, it is becoming critical to quickly onboard design novices. A huge amount of design techniques is available in digital service design processes. However, too-much-choice makes the selecting process difficult. Thus, selecting appropriate techniques is a challenge, especially for design novices. This dissertation project focuses on providing decision support for design novices to select design techniques in design processes. Several artifacts in the form of different types of classifications and web-based platforms were developed as decision aids seeking to guide novices to select design techniques in digital service design processes. A design science research paradigm was followed, and three design cycles were conducted in the entire dissertation project. Artifacts were developed and evaluated in each design cycle. In design cycle 1, an expert-based taxonomy and a set of novice-based tags were derived. In design cycle 2, the taxonomy and tags were instantiated as decision aids in a web-based platform and evaluated in a lab experiment. The evaluation demonstrated that the expert-based taxonomy outperformed the novice-based tags. In design cycle 3, an extended version of the web-based platform was developed, including a natural language user interface (UI) in combination with the taxonomy to provide selection support for design techniques. The results of the experimental evaluation of cycle 3 demonstrated that novices’ performance using graphical and natural language UI was dependent on decision-making style and duration of use. The work presented in this thesis contributes to the body of knowledge in the field of digital service design. In design cycle 1, the created taxonomy represents a theory for analysis (type I theory). In design cycle 2 and 3, the proposed design principles represent the core of a theory for design and action (type V theory) to guide the design of decision aids for supporting design novices’ selection of design techniques. Besides the theoretical contribution, the developed platform for the selection of design techniques contributes practically to help design novices select design techniques under different design situations.