Preparatory questions for the workshop "UCD in Practice - Problems and
Possibilities"
At the workshop we will not give any direct time for position paper
presentations. All participants are presumed to have read all contributions in advance.
To be fully prepared before the workshop we would want each participant
to submit one or two of the most important questions that You would want
the workshop to discuss.
Important questions
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How do you know when to stop your iterations?
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How do we speed up the UCD process?
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Where, when and how should the users participate for the most efficient
process and most usable resulting system?
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How do we treat organisational development, skills attainment and business
and work development during the introduction of new information
technology?
-
How can user participation be realized in organizations that consist to a
great extent of freelancers and independent contractors ?
-
Although several techniques and methods are available to involve users in the design process, involving them is still difficult and this mainly, because to succeed you need a positive context and practices. How to create the context (organizational and cultural) where you can use these techniques?
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How can the formal and informal powerstructures in an organisation be
taken into consideration during and after a participatory design project?
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How "mature" must the technology be to, in
an empirical study, avoid being traped at
the most basic "technological level"?
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Do users get what they say they want, or do they want a say in what
they get?
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Do users need to understand designers in a similar way to that in which
UCD expects designers to understand the users of their products?
-
Co-construction of shared understandings of users'/practitioners' work
practice in UCD and PD"
What are the views of work practice (system domain) that contribute to the
understandings that are used as design criteria for the system to be
developed? how is the co-construction of shared understandings achieved?
Definitions
Here our intention is to try and agree on definitions of these difficult
concepts in advance. Feel free to E-mail comments and additional concepts
to Jan.Gulliksen@hci.uu.se
User centred design
User Centred Design - is an approach to software design that identifies
four different basic principles; an appropriate allocation of function
between user and system, active involvement of users, iterations of design
solutions and multidisciplinary design teams. (Ref ISO 13407)
Participatory design
Participatory Design - is a specific user centred design approach in which
the users actually participates in and are in charge of the making of the
design decisions.
Comments about the definitions
Participatory design: for me, participatory design is a mode of
user-centered design which implies the involvement of the users not only
at the beginning and/or at the end of the process, but through all the
design process. I think there is two important requirements to do
participatory design: to ground the design process on observations of the
users practices in the real world and to have a multidisciplinary team.
For me, it is important to distinguish between bespoke (custom-built) and
off-the-shelf products.
To my mind participatory design suggests a bespoke product with the
participants being the real users of the system being developed.
User-centred design can apply to either kind of product - but in one
case you might be working with the real users, while in others working
with representative users (how representative?)
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