Participatory Design Sessions Research Articles

Fictional characters in participatory design sessions: Introducing the “design alter egos” technique

In recent years, the discourse concerning the relationship between narrative theory – storytelling in general – interactivity, and design is undeniably noteworthy. A significant part of this discourse concerns the use of fictional characters in design. Fictional characters have been used as user representatives, either substituting actual users or supporting idea generation, and their foremost objective is to facilitate the identification of user needs and goals and to support the development of detailed and comprehensive scenarios. Motivated by the aforementioned ongoing discourse and inspired by relevant approaches in the use of fictional characters in design, we aim to investigate the applicability and effectiveness of their use as a creative technique in participatory design sessions. We present a novel approach to using fictional characters in collaborative design of educational software with students, one that asks the participants for the formation and use of their own fictional characters – we introduce the term “design alter egos” – as a means to eliciting requirements and design ideas. In order to evaluate our approach, we conducted 20 collaborative design sessions with the participation of 94 undergraduate university students (aged 19–24) for eliciting requirements for the design of an ideal course website. The analysis of the results suggests that the design alter egos technique liberated the majority of the students from the fear of straightforwardly exposing themselves, supported and enhanced their introspection, stimulated their creativity, and helped to establish an informal and constructive atmosphere throughout the design sessions. We suggest the use of design alter egos as an engaging and effective supportive technique for co-designing educational software with students.

Paper Prototyping as a Rapid Participatory Design Technique

This paper describes participatory activities with university lecturers to design an online community. The objective of this study is to engage the users of an online community to collaboratively design their online community. We speculated that by involving them in the design team, we can identify their specific requirements, and they will accept and use the system. However, lecturers have heavy workload and tight schedule. For that reason, we thought that paper prototyping is the most suitable tool to be used because it is fast and easy to create. Therefore, paper prototyping technique has been adapted in a two-day participatory design session. We found that paper prototyping is indeed the most suitable technique to elicit requirements from the end users under a time constraint. Moreover, participants came out with unexpected requirements and novel interface.

Categorization Constructionist Assessment with Software-Based Affinity Diagramming

Affinity diagramming is a cheap and widely used knowledge elicitation technique in human–computer interaction (HCI). However, empirical methods for evaluating user performance in conducting affinity diagrams have remained relatively static. Despite the fact that often the main value of such affinity diagramming sessions lies in the group-based discussions and debates that take place during their construction, what is being captured is often only the final categorizations (the affinity diagram) rather than the process of constructing them. In this article, we propose the concept of categorization constructionism, which we describe as optimized when affinity diagrams are facilitated in groups that have a considerate input of activity in categorization decision-making. We describe how we used this rule to model the temporal nature found within affinity diagram categorizations as they are constructed. To help us test our approach, we utilized participatory design (PD) sessions in developing three TabletPC-based software tools (CATERINE, SAW, and MATE) that would record, allow manipulation of, and evaluate the organization of affinity constructs over time programmatically with digital inking processes. We then used these tools to conduct an experiment that would explore our concept of measuring constructionistic activity over time in practice through the use of our tools.

MatrixExplorer: a Dual-Representation System to Explore Social Networks

MatrixExplorer is a network visualization system that uses two representations: node-link diagrams and matrices. Its design comes from a list of requirements formalized after several interviews and a participatory design session conducted with social science researchers. Although matrices are commonly used in social networks analysis, very few systems support the matrix-based representations to visualize and analyze networks. MatrixExplorer provides several novel features to support the exploration of social networks with a matrix-based representation, in addition to the standard interactive filtering and clustering functions. It provides tools to reorder (layout) matrices, to annotate and compare findings across different layouts and find consensus among several clusterings. MatrixExplorer also supports Node-link diagram views which are familiar to most users and remain a convenient way to publish or communicate exploration results. Matrix and node-link representations are kept synchronized at all stages of the exploration process.

Identity and role—A qualitative case study of cooperative scenario building

In this study, we argue that users participating in the design process will form the participation as a function of their professional role, but also as a function of their identity more or less independent from their role. In order to get the full potential of cooperative design the user identity in general and in this case their attitudes towards technology in particular should be incorporated into the design process. This case study consists of participatory design sessions with two different organizations, in the context of a media production tool development project. Facilitator skills, and workshop interventions to balance attitudes and to take them into account in design are discussed. Furthermore, we argue that attitudes will affect a subsequent implementation of a technical system, and that knowledge about stakeholder identity can be useful for further design activities and for planning system implementation.

Universal product design involving elderly users: a participatory design model

Recent studies have shown that people prefer to age in their familiar environments, thus guiding designers to provide a safe and functionally appropriate environment for ageing people, regardless of their physical conditions or limitations. Therefore, a participatory design model is proposed where human beings can improve their quality of life by promoting independence, as well as safety, useability and attractiveness of the residence. Brainstorming, scenario building, unstructured interviews, sketching and videotaping are used as techniques in the participatory design sessions. Quality deployment matrices are employed to find the relationships between the elderly user's requirements and design specifications. A case study was devised to apply and test the conceptual model phase of the proposed model.

Task management support in information seeking: a case for search histories

This paper reports the results of an extensive user study that examined information seekers' use of their memory and externally recorded search histories in searching for and using information in the legal domain. The ultimate goal of the research is to design search-history-based user interface tools to support information seeking. The results reported here focus on the management of complex information-seeking tasks. Computers can automatically record human–computer interaction events, allow the user to manipulate this information, and provide it back to the searcher through the user interface. In order to understand how this information can best support information seekers, the role of users' internal and external memory processes was examined using qualitative research methods (observations, interviews, and participatory user interface design sessions). The data collected were analyzed to identify potential task areas where search histories can support information seeking and use. The results show that many information-seeking tasks can take advantage of automatically and manually recorded history information. One of these areas is described in this paper: the management of complex tasks. Results of the study from the legal user group presented evidence of the utility of search histories and history-based interface tools.

Human Factors Applications to the Design of Legal Offices

A programming study was undertaken to examine diverse human factors considerations associated with a renovation design appraisal for a small public defender clinic. The study used a multimethod approach involving interviews, a questionnaire, and a participatory design session. Subsequently, the programming team was able to describe a variety of design implications arising from human functional concerns within the firm. These ranged from appropriate workplace arrangement of the legal secretary to the social/professional image of client accessed interview spaces.