Participatory development of user experience design guidelines for a B2B company

Abstract

As business success is increasingly dependent on an organization's ability to provide a pleasant user experiences (UX) for its products, companies need to find ways to harness every employee to think about UX in their daily work. To support this goal, we present a participatory development process to create user experience design guidelines for a company developing materials-handling equipment for warehouses. The guidelines were developed to steer the work of all R&D designers and developers towards experience-driven design of the products in business-to-business context. The participatory process includes six steps: Spreading awareness of UX within the company, providing information on UX, supporting understanding of UX, co-creation of guidelines, reviewing the outcome, and implementing the guidelines. This paper concentrates on describing the first five phases. The participatory approach is applicable by other organizations to support the change towards experience-driven design. The process and outcome aims to support employees' everyday work aiming for products with pleasant UX.