Guiding situated method transfer in design and evaluation

Abstract

The purpose is to suggest guidelines for supporting the transfer of design and evaluation methods from one organization/field/sector to another. There exist a variety of methods for designing and evaluating interactive socio-technical systems. Many of them have been developed for dedicated purposes, such as heuristic evaluation, referring to specific situations and artifacts. Due to the recent diversification of devices and the continuing diffusion of society with interactive systems, applying design and evaluation methods in an effective and efficient way has become crucial, in particular when operating under tight economic conditions and demanding user constraints. Learning from other projects, cases, disciplines or sectors seems to be one way to effectively apply methods in design and evaluation. In order to validate the suggested guidelines, the guidelines are theoretically informed and empirically supported by the use of a case study. The results consist of a set of seven guidelines for method transfer. The guidelines are described in terms of questions to ask, expected input and expected output and how they relate to the other guidelines. Transferring methods require an informed procedure, reflecting the rationale of methods, application-specific factors and experience of use. In this paper, some conceptual foundations are given when exploring transferability of methods and implemented in the field of IT cross-sector developments. The developed guidelines allow developers to identify situation-specific elements and design an effective learning experience for a case at hand. The introduced content structure and interactive features show an effective way of developer support.