Making sense of methods and approaches to user involvement

Abstract

There has been a dramatic growth in the ways of involving users in various product, service, space, and systems development activities. Various categorizations, listings, and mappings have been proposed for making sense of this user-involvement landscape. The present paper introduces the main types of currently available clarificatory mappings used in design for, with, and by users, as well as the shortcomings associated with them. It then proceeds to elaborate how such mappings could be better organized in the future, stressing the importance of distinguishing between techniques, methods, methodologies, and approaches. While sensible mappings are difficult if not impossible to ever achieve regarding techniques and methods, wider approaches in how designer–user relations are organized in time and space do appear to be amenable to differentiation. We elaborate a typology of nine approach-level user-involvement configurations based on resemblance relations, and how these in turn help make sense of wider research areas.

Keywords:

• Extended user involvement
• user communities
• methods
• methodology
• approaches
• methods mapping

Introduction

During the last two decades, users’ productive capabilities have become a ‘fact of life’ in industry, in various social movements and in academia (Voss et al. 2009; Hyysalo, Jensen, and Oudshoorn 2016a; von Hippel 2016). This has meant that users, customers, peers, and citizens (from now on ‘users’ in short) have become widely engaged in design activities. An increasing array of arrangements – methods, tools, procedures, techniques, methodologies – has emerged by which users’ practices, knowledge, creativity, and efforts can become engaged with (e.g. Galabo et al. 2021; Hyysalo, Jensen, and Oudshoorn 2016a; Sanders and Stappers 2008). This has particularly been the case with IT design, where digital services and platforms have enabled new ways to organize design participation across time and space, sharing knowledge and pooling contributions among users and between users and designers (Bovaird 2007; Botero and Saad-Sulonen 2010; Voss et al. 2009; Hyysalo et al. 2016b; von Hippel 2005).

The multiplication of forms for engaging with (and between) users has led to difficulties in keeping pace with what differences exist in different ways users are involved or investigated in and for design. The available mappings and comparisons tend to feature persistent problems, and the consequences are not only academic: our 20-year research programme on user engagement in real-life projects in private and public organizations and citizen communities indicates that practitioners use methods they happen to be acquainted with or happen to encounter even if other approaches and methods would be clearly better suited for the project they are working on (Hyysalo et al. 2016b). For instance, if they believe that co-design means running co-located workshops, that is what they will do, even if more distributed or asynchronous forms of participation might have suited the project better (cf. Hartswood et al. 2002; Karasti, Baker, and Millerand 2010; Botero and Hyysalo 2013; Botero et al. 2020). This underscores the need to better elaborate differences in user involvement across the whole continuum of their involvement from mere informants to independent designers (Arnstein 1969; Asaro 2000; von Hippel 2016; Hyysalo et al. 2016b). The current paper thus seeks to clarify:

1. What issues and conceptual shortcomings hamper the currently available descriptions, listings, and mappings of user involvement?

2. What aspects of user-involvement approaches can be differentiated with less conceptual muddles and how this can be done?

3. How can approach differentiation be used to map the presently existing range of main user-involvement approaches and illustrate how these relate to wider research and practice areas?

Mappings of methods in user involvement

Method mappings and repositories are a common facet in human-centred design (HCD) and participatory design (PD) as they are in research on open-source development (OSS) and community-based design and innovation. Across these areas, there are both (sub)field method listings and ‘mixed origin mappings’ or ‘landscape mappings’.

Let us depart from subfield-specific method and technique mappings. These mappings seek to help in comparing the relevance, merits, and limitations of methods (Maguire 2001; Kaulio 1998). The within-field mappings have recently developed into electronic resources; for example, in user experience (UX) design research, www.allaboutux.org provides resources and listings of 82 UX techniques, methods, and methodologies, with search functions that in some repositories also allow some basic project parameters to be entered. Similarly, ucdtoolbox.com (Kuijk and Staats 2012), and actioncatalogue.eu map stakeholder engagement methods and techniques to basic project parameters.

A good example is the influential mapping of PD methods and techniques that Kuhn and Muller wrote in the early 1990s and that has been reprinted in several handbooks since (Kuhn and Muller 1993), where PD activities were organized according to two dimensions. The y-axis differentiates between creating knowledge of the use context and directly drawing users into design. The x-axis position signals whether the methods and techniques are applicable early or late in the development cycle. They further indicate the geography, use in industry, and suitable group size.

While the mapping is instructive, the fixed connection of a method or technique to a specific position – early or late – in a development cycle or iteration presumes two assumptions that feature commonly in this kind of mapping but are true only for certain development projects. The first common assumption is that developers and designers know little about the users early in a project. The second is that the product is so immature that it cannot be user-tested at an early stage. But in contrast to the 1990s when Kuhn and Muller made their mappings, in many of today’s development contexts knowledge about users is cumulative and combined, and projects can benefit from real user data already in the beginning of the project (Johnson et al. 2014; Mäkinen, Hyysalo, and Johnson 2019; Savolainen 2021). The project phase is thus a problematic organizing principle based on an assumed design process type, and as we come to see, many industry practices’ novel methods seek to alter the nature of the design process.

An even greater problem in field-specific listings is that they almost always close the space to neighbouring disciplines in a way that is hard to justify in terms of genealogy. For instance, in the lower part of Figure 1, we find Maguire’s (2001) highly influential HCD methods mapping that features a wild variety of techniques and origins beyond HCD: focus groups were invented by the sociologist Robert Merton in the 1950s for quite a different purpose than design; stakeholder analysis emerged between the 1930s and 1960s for use in corporate responsibility; brainstorming was derived from marketing creativity exercises after the Second World War; and card sorting in work modelling evolved within PD and development studies in the 1970s. How just these methods and not others ‘belong’ to such a seemingly ‘field’-specific mapping (and the same holds for Kuhn and Muller and most within-field method listings) appears almost happenstance. As the genealogies reveal, the ‘fields’ that delineate methods to be mapped can be rather arbitrary constructions.

Figure 1. Mapping of PD methods (Kuhn and Muller 1993) (upper image) and A listing of HCD methods (Maguire 2001) (lower image), both reprinted with permission.

‘Mixed origin mappings’ such as the Danish user-driven innovation portal www.innotour.com/innovation-tools/user-driven-methods/, and ‘landscape’ type mappings, such as those of Sanders and Stappers (2008), acknowledge this from the outset. At best, landscape mapping can organize the mutual relations between fields and elaborate how different ways to organize user involvement may entail different design processes and thus do not lapse into problematic unified design process as a backbone (as critiqued above).

The landscape mappings, unfortunately, aggravate some of the problems that also commonly hamper the within-subfield listings. To concretize the types of these problems, let us examine Sanders and Stappers (2008) in Figure 2 in more detail. Note that similarly to Kuhn and Muller (1993) and Maguire (2001), we focus on Sanders and Stappers’s mapping because it is well known, represents well the problems that feature in the available mappings more widely, and its authors are so prominent that our critique in no way harms them (in contrast to what could happen if we used as examples from works by early career authors).

Figure 2. Landscape mapping of co-design (Sanders and Stappers 2008), reprinted with permission.

Sanders and Stappers present the mapping as a cognitive collage of HCD research. It structures the items into ‘zones’, ‘clusters’, and ‘bubbles’. For example, in the large user-centred design zone, we find three clusters (human factors and ergonomics, applied ethnography, and usability testing) and two bubbles (contextual inquiry and lead-user innovation). The mapping positions the items on two axes ranging from user as subject to user as partner, and from led by research to led by design.

While this looks very helpful at a first glance, a closer look renders it less so. The first problem concerns item structure and naming. What exactly are zones, clusters, and bubbles? And on what basis are the items cast into one of these types? The four zones (critical design, design and emotion, user-centred design, and PD) could refer to approaches to design research, since the authors state that ‘participatory design is an approach’, but the ‘approach’ concept is used rather vaguely. For instance, both lead-user innovation and generative tools are also denoted as approaches, even though they are ‘mere’ bubbles, not zones. This leads us to problems in item naming. The cluster called usability testing is described as ‘measuring how well people can use something for its intended purpose (which borrows from cognitive psychology and cognitive engineering)’. This sounds like an abstraction of more precisely defined usability evaluation techniques; see 7.1–7.8 in Figure 1 (lower image). However, making usability testing the main heading is confusing, since in the usability field, usability testing with users in a usability lab is just one way of doing a usability evaluation. The lead-user innovation bubble is even more confusing as a title. Lead-user innovation is not a category by which the close to 1500 researchers focusing on innovation by users identify themselves. Rather, user innovation research comprises research on a considerably broader array of topics and users than just lead users, even if one of its main findings has been that innovation by users tends to be concentrated in people who meet lead-user characteristics (von Hippel 2005; Churchill, Hippel, and Sonnack 2009). If innovation by lead users was only a naturally occurring phenomenon and not closely connected to a particular stream of research, this naming could perhaps be justified. But this is not the case, and the naming now connects to an even more important issue, which is item extension and status. The landscape now gives lead-user innovation and contextual inquiry an equal status, which confuses their relative position. Within user innovation research, there are several methodologies, and if one chooses, for instance, the lead-user method, then the counterpart to contextual inquiry would in fact be the lead-user identification process. In turn, the lead-user method (von Hippel 2005; Churchill, Hippel, and Sonnack 2009) would be comparable to contextual design (Beyer and Holtzblatt 1998; Holtzblatt and Jones 1993). Partially nested relations between entities pose further delimitation issues, such as in the cluster of applied ethnography within HCD zone, which uproots ethnography from its over a century of academic and professional history in both anthropology and social sciences at workplaces and by now many kinds of applications in marketing, innovation, and organizational reform – because of this, its ‘applied’ nature in the ‘UCD zone’ could also point to several different ways in which it has been applied independently as well as part of design methodologies.

Finally, to end our critique of method mappings, we wish to address the position that designers sometimes voice that the criterion for how user-involvement methods interlink should be the way by which professional designers see their differences in their practice. This avenue of thought may however sound better than it is. A robust example of how professional designers’ perceptions have been formalized to arrive at a methods map is the card-sorting exercise with designers by Goodman-Deane et al. (2008). They identified a large number of design methods and techniques covering fields such as product design, HCI, and ergonomics. Then, they chose 57 methods for understanding and involving users aiming for a representative range of method types. Each method was described on a card, and 21 designers got to organize the methods into groups as they like, and label the groups. A cluster analysis of their method items and groups is presented in Figure 3. The result under-represents the available methods for user participation, and favours indirect user representations (Mäkinen, Hyysalo, and Johnson 2019). Direct user contact (cluster F in Figure 3) is limited to interview-based techniques (Talking to users, e.g. co-design, focus groups) and non-interview techniques (other user contact, e.g. shadowing, usability testing). This puts ‘co-design’ in an odd place, since, in contrast, from a co-design perspective one could argue that users could be present and participating in any of the A–F method clusters. The F-cluster of ‘Direct user contact’ is a rather weak place in terms of design agency compared with the other clusters, even as many PD projects empower users, who participate in a broader range of design activities, or even take the matter entirely in their own hands (cf. Bødker, Kensing, and Simonsen 2004; Voss et al. 2009; von Hippel 2016). In all, it appears that professional designers’ categorizations may in fact be more biased, conservative, and potentially confused regarding user involvement than the academic attempts at clarification even if these tend to come with their own problems.

Figure 3. Clusters of methods (Goodman-Deane et al. 2008), reprinted with permission.

To summarize this section, through examining the prominent examples of methods maps and listings, we illustrated that the assumed phase in a design process, muddled disciplinary origins, poorly informed designers’ perceptions, vague mapping structures, confused naming, and vague item extension and status are common problems that hamper adequately differentiating between the various user-involvement methods and approaches. The mapping of user-involvement methods thus calls for more serious typological work and clarifying what can and what cannot be sensibly mapped. This is where we turn to next.

Clarifying the layers of approaches, methodologies, methods, and techniques

Some parameters needed for better mapping user-involvement methods and approaches can be found in the information systems and HCD. Information systems development (ISD) methods have been decomposed into four layers by Iivari, Hirschheim, and Klein (2000). Their most incremental layer is techniques where they list items, such as use cases and rich pictures. Their next layer is methodologies, which consist of a combination of techniques and establish the relations between them as a detailed development process. The methodologies, in turn, are seen as instances of ISD approaches that hold more overarching goals, guiding principles, fundamental concepts, and principles for the development process.

Similarly, in HCD Woolrych et al. (2011) clarify how ‘methods as recipes’ – such as cognitive walkthrough or user testing – are factually complemented by what they call the ‘resources’ that go into realizing the method recipe, such as enrolling the participants, reporting formats, the merging of findings, and the detailed carrying out of protocols. They further point out that ‘method recipes’ are hardly ever used in their own right but are used as part of ‘usability work’ in a particular development context. Three layers are thus discerned, those of ‘usability work’ – ‘methods as recipes’ – ‘the practical tasks and resources’.

What these works suggest is a typology of four layers that we find helpful in clarifying the interrelations of different items for design for, with, and by users. The layer of methods as recipes of Woolrych et al. and the techniques of Iivari et al. find, by and large, the same extension in what we find clearest to call methods (such as cognitive walkthrough). Woolrych et al. decompose these methods further into practical tasks, representations, and resources, which denote the more elemental end of the techniques of Iivari et al. and which we find clearest to call techniques. These are needed to realize methods, that is, methods consist of the application of techniques, and in turn methodologies consist of a combination of methods. Finally, methodologies are instances of families of approaches to how designer–user relations have been organized in design (Bjerknes, Ehn, and Kyng 1987; Voss et al. 2009). In this schemata, the various tools for user involvement, typically physical templates or digital forms, are seen as complementary resources to either techniques or methods (cf. Galabo et al. 2021).

These interrelations can be illustrated with examples taken from HCD, PD, and recently emerged extended-PD approaches. In HCD, a good example is how contextual inquiry, contextual design and HCD interrelate (Table 1). An approach such as HCD is a class that exists through being instantiated in several methodologies, one being contextual design. These, in turn, are composed of a combination of methods, such as contextual inquiry, that are in turn composed of several techniques, such as sequencing findings to sequence diagrams.

Table 1. Examples of the relations between approach, methodology, method, and technique in human-centred design.

Layer	Example	Source
Approach	Human-centred design	ISO 9241-210
Methodology	Contextual design	Beyer and Holtzblatt (1998)
Method	Contextual inquiry	Holtzblatt and Jones (1993)
Technique	Action sequence diagram	Anthropologists, sociologists, and systems analysts since the second half of the twentieth century

An important point to realize is that these interrelations in user involvement feature varying specificity. Within methodologies, typically several different methods and techniques are used. Some of these methods are relatively specific to a specific methodology, such as contextual inquiry’s specificity to contextual design. More loose connections can be found, for instance, in how a future workshop method features in MUST (Bødker, Kensing, and Simonsen 2004). A method can be used as part of different approaches if used somewhat differently, such as using service blueprinting in cooperative design not as an analyst’s tool but used in collaboration with user participants. Finally, there are methods that are used virtually across the board of engagements between developers and users, such as some forms of building mock-ups or qualitative interviewing (see below Figure 4).

Figure 4. Schematic portrayal of approach–methodology–method–technique relations.

The same goes for techniques. For instance, the specific way to combine watching and asking during fieldwork is specific to contextual inquiry, but in contrast, sequence diagrams of user action are commonly used in a range of approaches, be it HCD, cooperative design, or open design. Even approaches that are particularly distinct in their orientation such as approachses in PD that have shifted design into sites of use for extended periods of time (e.g. Hartswood et al. 2002; Voss et al. 2009; Botero 2013) may feature techniques that are used also for different aims and within different designer–user relations in other approaches, for example dialogue sessions about users work with a system-in-use conducted on-site (cf. Buur and Bagger 1999).

From this, it follows that both the methods and techniques layers hold a considerable amount of category inclusion and ‘difficult-to-classify in and out memberships’: not everything is part of everything, but many techniques and methods are included in several different kinds of methodologies and approaches, which in turn qualify how they are deployed. This, we argue, is at least one of the root causes for the difficulties in mapping both methods within subfields as well as in mapping the overarching features of the landscape: the mappings tend to become muddled when they seek to compare items of different layers, extensions, and specificities, and particularly the layers of techniques and methods tend not to be specific, or defining, wider methodologies within which they are used, let alone always specific to a field.

Conceptual starting points for distinguishing approaches to user involvement

In contrast to mapping of techniques or methods, we see hope in mapping methodologies being parts of approaches and differentiating between approaches in affinity to Iivari, Hirschheim, and Klein (2000). In so doing, the interrelation between methodologies (instances) and approaches (categories) can be regarded as graded category memberships. Following prototype theory (Rosch 1973, 1975), a category is seen not as an Aristotelian additive sum of properties (bird = beak + feathers + hollow bones + born from an egg + has wings) but as consisting of elements with unequal status that impact on its category membership, drawing from Wittgenstein’s work on family resemblance. A graded membership in a category (a ‘family’ of items) results in some items being more prototypical of the family than others according to Rosch’s definition of prototype. A sparrow is more prototypically a bird than an ostrich or penguin, similar to how a chair is more prototypical of a piece of furniture than a lamp or a potted plant that retains a relatively more peripheral membership in the category of furniture. Similarly, MUST (Bødker, Kensing, and Simonsen 2004) is more prototypical of the class of collaborative design than say ‘consumer idealized design’ (Kaulio 1998), which would, nonetheless, have a lower-grade membership within the class.

We suggest prototype theory as an organizing principle also because disciplinary lineage no longer adequately determines the approach in which a methodology is located. For instance, as we discuss in detail below, exploratory living labs (Leminen 2015; Williams, Slack, and Stewart 2005), extended co-design in sites of use (Hartswood et al. 2002; Botero 2013), and collaborative perpetual beta industry strategies (Johnson 2013) land in the same ‘extended real-life setting design-in-use engagement’ with users, albeit all from different origins. Similarly, living labs development pursued in a test-bed mode, user innovation toolkits, and open API ecosystems all depart from different disciplinary backgrounds yet factually end up in a user-involvement configuration that rests on a platform-based producer-to-many user inputs configuration. Hence, in terms of the instance–class relation, it has become sensible to begin to emphasize ‘resemblance’ along ‘lineage’.

Figure 4 provides an illustration of how approach–methodology–method–technique interrelations can be mapped. We illustrate with just three approaches and just one of the methodologies that instantiate it, and one method and technique used within each (see Tables 1–3). Some dual memberships to approaches take place at the layer of methodologies already (the approach overlap areas), and this increases with methods and techniques as discussed above (white extension lines). We have added grey semi-structured interviewing as well as open sorting and coding to illustrate how some methods and techniques hold inclusion in a very wide variety of methodologies and thus approaches.

Table 2. Examples of the relations between approach, methodology, method, and technique in participatory design.

Layer	Example	Source
Approach	Participatory design	Simonsen and Robertson (2012)
Methodology	MUST	Bødker, Kensing, and Simonsen (2004)
Method	Future workshops	Kensing and Madsen (1991)
Technique	Wall graphs of current work practices	Bødker, Kensing, and Simonsen (2004)

In differentiating approaches, we can thus examine the user-involvement configuration that the methodologies within the approach use in relating designers and users. The following elements are implied:

1. the broad rationale for why the methodology seeks to involve users;

2. the roles and responsibilities designated for designers and for users;

3. the arrangements by which design solutions are sought to be achieved;

4. the arrangements by which solutions, domain knowledge, and need and preference information are carried between designers and users.

By broad rationale for involving users, we mean the rationale for why users are involved in design. For instance, methodologies that reside within collaborative design share the rationale that users are experts of their own realities and can bring their understanding and their creativity into the design process by participating in design activities. While these methodologies differ widely as regards why the incorporation of user realities is desirable for design – improving profits, making work affording systems, empowering the underprivileged, democratizing technology development (and so on) – the broad rationale for involvement is broadly shared and remains distinctly different from approaches, for example, that rely on users doing the designing on their own.

The broad rationale is tied to roles and responsibilities designated for designers and users. Continuing the above example, collaborative design holds designers as the experts of organizing and tooling the collaboration and refining designs developed together with users whose main role and responsibility are to convey the needs and requirements of use contexts. Such a cast of roles is simply not held in open design communities, for example, where designer roles and responsibilities for the design outcomes are considerably reduced.

The arrangements for producing design solutions feature spatial, temporal, and material differences. For instance, most collaborative design, UX, and HCD methodologies trust that engagement between designers and users results in solutions that can be tested, iterated, and launched. In contrast, extended design-in-use methodologies (see Table 3, Figure 4) such as co-realization (Hartswood et al. 2002; Voss et al. 2009) presume that truly work affording systems only result from many iterations at the site of use and being ‘used in anger’ by real users in their real contexts.

Table 3. Examples of the relations between approach, methodology, method, and technique in extended (participatory) design in use.

Layer	Example	Source
Approach	Extended-participatory design-in-use	(Hartswood et al. 2002; Voss et al. 2009; Botero 2013)
Methodology	Co-realization	(Hartswood et al. 2002; Voss et al. 2009)
Method	Placement of designer in the site where prototype is installed to continue	(Hartswood et al. 2002)
Technique	Dialogue about system-in-use at the user’s site	Researchers in ethnography and sociology of work, human-centred design, and PD

Arrangements by which knowledge, ideas, and solutions are conveyed between the parties typically relate to the above and often make the prototypical methodological characteristics most visible. Crowdsourcing pursued with pen and paper is possible, but without an adequately designed platform, it results in such a taxing amount of manual labour that it can be carried out only in exceptional circumstances or as an addition to other methods (Hyysalo and Hyysalo 2018). Similarly, one can pursue extended design-in-use by inviting the users to periodic workshops, but it is far more effective to place the designer at the users’ site or monitor the alterations users make to a digital service, thus relying on different information-transfer arrangements (Voss et al. 2009; Botero 2013; Johnson 2013).

When discussing the user-involvement configurations of different approaches, we further illustrate them with the help of a graphical mapping originating in Heiskanen et al. (2010). The mapping depicts producers, users, information flow and arrangements, and shared participation context(s) (see Figure 5). In the notation, producer (p) stands for the party that seeks to produce the service or product under design, and users (u) the people implicated by it.

Figure 5. Left: collaborative design. Interactions between designers as representatives of the producer (P) and user (U) representatives, often from multiple background communities (light grey circles). Right: extended design-in-use. Interactions between producers (P) and users (U) are predominantly asynchronous and temporally extended, mediated predominantly by evolving service/product and exchange and collaboration arrangements around it and its evolving usages.

The user-involvement configurations presented and compared below are depicted at the layer of approach, or ‘methodology family’, and thus they exclude considerations of, for example, particular project objectives or combinations of approaches used in the course of a particular project (e.g. Hyysalo and Hyysalo 2018; Botero et al. 2020). As important as project differences are regarding how approaches are deployed in particular projects and the effects that then follow (Hyysalo, Jensen, and Oudshoorn 2016a; Hyysalo et al. 2016b; Botero et al. 2020; von Busch and Palmås 2023), project specifics are not pursued in the present paper to retain clarity over approach differences. We start doing so from collaborative design towards user community-based approaches, before turning to ‘lighter’ approaches to user involvement.

From collaborative design to design communities

Collaborative design and extended design-in-use

Traditionally collaborative design has meant taking users and other stakeholders in the design process as partners, often as experts of their own work or everyday practice (Bjerknes, Ehn, and Kyng 1987; Simonsen and Robertson 2012). Interactions between designers and users have been predominantly co-located and mediated by tools that help users to design, such as easy-to-use work modelling, idea cards, mock-ups, and design games (Voss et al. 2009; Simonsen and Robertson 2012). How the aims, responsibilities, design process, decision-making, control, and ownership of results are organized depends on the underlying rationale, be that the conflict perspective, PD, community PD or simply co-design as means for getting desirable products and services onto the market (Bjerknes, Ehn, and Kyng 1987; Simonsen and Robertson 2012; Sanders and Stappers 2008). Irrespective of these differences, the traditional collaborative design methodologies rest primarily on synchronous and typically co-located user-involvement configuration. Most projects have also been limited to pre-launch stages of design, even as this is not a defining limitation. Because of this synchronicity and co-location emphasizing character, we choose to call this family of methodologies collaborative design, for which many methodologies can be found, a prototypical example being MUST as discussed above (Bødker, Kensing, and Simonsen 2004). Synchronous collaborative design can be scaled up through a range of mechanisms, but the empirical fact remains that the participation has been limited to tens or hundreds of people, exceptional cases aside.

As noted above, traditional collaborative design configurations have given rise to new extended design-in-use configurations. What is common to these methodologies is that they rest on a primarily asynchronous and typically long-term exchange between designers and users that continues also after the initial product/service launch – a slowly paced, materially mediated dialogue that can last for years (Hartswood et al. 2002; Botero 2013; Johnson 2013). Such methodologies have emerged from within PD, prototypical of these being co-realization (Hartswood et al. 2002), meta-design (Fischer 2007) and Ageing together (Botero 2013), and various infrastructuring projects (Karasti, Baker, and Millerand 2010; Botero 2013). Equally important instances of extended design-in-use are exploratory projects conducted with living labs, where the bulk of the technology design is carried out at the real user sites (Hillgren, Seravalli, and Emilson 2011; Leminen 2015). Similar, gradual, continued design-in-use projects have been pursued in industry contexts, often with design ethnography orientation at the background (Szymanski and Whalen 2011; Botero et al. 2020). Similarly, many methodologies within end-user development are instances of extended design-in-use (Lieberman et al. 2006), as they build tools for programming competent users to self-serve in building and maintaining their systems, and then evolutionarily redesign these tools as end-user projects take shape. Yet the most widespread application of extended design-in-use is found outside academia in minimum viable product (MVP) digital service development (Johnson 2013).

In all extended design-in-use, the main mediating mechanism between designers and users is product-in-use (or service-in-use, or infrastructure-in-use), in which both designers and users act and create at least new content if not form. Owing to the diverse origins and differences in specific projects, extended design-in-use features considerable variation in whether user involvement rests primarily on users’ ideas or their solutions. When solutions are emphasized, users are more in the driver’s seat in volunteering and suggesting new uses, new value points, and design solutions (Lieberman et al. 2006; Fischer 2007; Kohtala, Hyysalo, and Whalen 2020). When resting on users’ ideas, wishes, and needs, (co)designers take an active role in paying close attention to users’ creative acts and how they articulate what is valuable for them in the design, often utilizing ethnographic observation (Hartswood et al. 2002; Johnson 2013; Kohtala, Hyysalo, and Whalen 2020; Szymanski and Whalen 2011). In terms of scale, the extended design-in-use features a wide range, from design within a single workplace or community to hundreds of thousands of users contributing to evolving digital services in the course of their life cycle; compare Botero (2013) and Johnson (2013). Collaborative design and extended-design-in-use are presented in Figure 5, and typical methodologies and techniques within them in Figure 4.

Coordinated user design and user–designer communities

An increasing number of predominantly IT-based user-involvement methodologies rely on a platform and a hub–spoke user-involvement configuration that does not require (and usually does not in practice include) interactions among users. Hence, no real user community is formed, or, if it is, it remains as an additive element. We choose to call this (Host) coordinated user design, as it means creating technical and social arrangements by which users can independently provide solutions to company (or other host’s) products or services. The prototypical methodologies in coordinated user design are open Application Programming Interface-based (open API) ecologies, user innovation toolkits (von Hippel and Katz 2002), solution crowdsourcing, and the test-bed use of living labs (Leminen 2015; Williams, Slack, and Stewart 2005). Less central but equally important members of this approach are solution libraries generated in mass-customization platforms and various ‘hosted activities’ in the physical spaces such as museums, in which a designated location, conduct rules, and materials listings create a de facto platform into which users can design and bring their own events (Simon 2010).

The key marker of coordinated user design is a platform design that makes user solutions fit directly to host products or production processes with relatively small translation costs per user solution for the host. For instance, open APIs allow users to program (small) applications for a software platform and ensure they work if coded properly, which can result in very large added value creation without massive investment from the producer, for example, millions of apps in Android and Apple app stores. Similarly, user-innovation toolkits provide designing users a finite module library of company production materials, which makes it easy for the producer to adopt and offer whatever users choose to design with them. von Hippel (2005) illustrates the benefits with Nestlé’s process. Its partner chefs and production chefs needed to exchange for an average of 26 weeks to translate an initial partner’s new sauce recipe to Nestlé’s production process, which featured industrial scope machines and compatible ingredients, storage, preservatives, additives (and so on). Sending the partner chefs a finite production material library of 30 most used production ingredients did not curb their innovation and improved the translation of ideas to production into just 3 weeks.

Coordinated user design is thus particularly apt when user-generated additional designs and variations can extend a more generic offering. Consequently, the scale of participation in platform coordinated user design can be very wide, and the hub–spoke configuration allows for upscaling the number of participants without excessive community management efforts and costs. The unfolding of participation is, however, predominantly limited to the making of one or few small complete additions to the platform (such as apps or crowdsourcing solutions or test-bed reports). A user contributing to say a test-bed or app ecosystem can, at most, lobby the producer regarding the overall development directions of a platform. This stands in important contrast to open user-designer communities, which will be discussed next.

Moving to approaches that primarily rest on users’ design efforts among peers, a relatively established division line runs between ‘independent’ and ‘hybrid’ user-innovation communities. The former includes (as prototypical cases) innovation by users, free- and open-source software communities (Ratto 2003; von Hippel 2005), open-design communities of physical products based on digital sharing of blueprints (Balka, Raasch, and Herstatt 2009; Abel et al. 2011) and locality-based user innovation communities (von Hippel 2016; Van Oost, Verhaegh, and Oudshoorn 2009), and open content production communities such as wikipedia/media (Ardati 2023). The enabling significance of IT sharing and pooling of peer contributions is formidable in all of these, even as the locality-based communities and individual user innovators can manage without it (von Hippel 2016).

Hybrid user-innovation communities are found in open-source software projects hosted by a firm such as Open Office (Freeman 2011) and in design-intensive user groups and brand communities (Hyysalo et al. 2016b; Holmström 2004). Independent and hybrid user communities are worth keeping separate, as importantly different dynamics pertain to their community management, ownership, control, and the setting of development directions.

Common to all community-based user-involvement configurations is that participation among peers holds a range of orientations from inner-circle user-developers to occasional design contributors and an outer circle of participants who test, report, translate, advocate, and use the community outputs. The scale of participation in user community design can become very large, Linux and Wikipedia being prime examples, but this requires setting up careful arrangements for managing the community and the contributions that it creates (Ratto 2003; Freeman 2011; Ardati 2023; see Figures 6 and 7).

Figure 6. Left: host coordinated user design, where users (U) contribute solutions that directly fit the producer’s (P) product architecture through a structured platform. Middle and right: user community-based design rests on user-developers and outer circles of less intensively involved user (U) participants. In hybrid communities, a producer (p) is a central participant.

Figure 7. User-design community-based approaches with example variants, methods, and techniques.

Lighter user involvement from HCD to user inspiration

Having now covered the approaches where parts or all design is shifted to users, let us move to examining those approaches, where some users are involved as informants and typically for relatively short periods. In these approaches, it is rather the designers that seek to participate in users’ communities and practices through some user involvement. Out of these approaches, the two most established ones rely on the investigation of users. Most methodologies are instances of HCD and its subset of usability engineering. HCD methodologies seek to give the needs, wants, and limitations of the end-users of a product, service or process extensive attention at each stage of the design process (ISO 9241-210). In all prototypical HCD methodologies, information about the contexts, requirements, and preferences of users is systematically collected, analysed, stored, and moved to design solutions. The methods that comprise HCD methodologies have a wide range, including ethnographic observation, interviews, surveys, artefact analysis, task analysis, role mapping, surveys, data-logging, prototyping, and a range of testing methods.

In the present millennium, HCD has largely given away to UX design, that emphasizes the experiential, affective, meaningful, and valuable aspects of human–computer interaction and product ownership, and has developed distinct set of methodologies, separate from HCD (ISO 9241-210). Instead of cognitive psychology and theories of action, UX draws from the psychology of experience and affects, as well as drawing from design disciplines (Hassenzahl and Tractinsky 2006; Law et al. 2009), warranting that HCD and UX are differentiated as approaches despite otherwise quite similar investigation-based developer–user configuration.

It is important to note also that in-depth forms of marketing research such as those based on ethnography operate within the same basic user-involvement configuration between developers and users, and thus the investigation-based approaches are not limited to those found within human–computer interaction (Hyysalo, Jensen, and Oudshoorn 2016a; Hyysalo et al. 2016b). The same goes for universal design, ergonomics, and cognitive ergonomics insofar as they involve users in either field studies or laboratory testing and do not just proceed with design guidelines and heuristics (which is of course a limiting condition to user involvement in HCD and UX; not all the methods within these involve users either).

The final area in our mapping is conditions where the designer/user distinction is blurred by the designer having a full membership also in the user domain. This allows designers, insofar as they really are competent users, to design in a responsible fashion based on user inspiration so that any investigation, dialogue, or meeting with users is just a secondary addition. We can discern two distinct types of such dual membership.

The first of these we call designer immersion in use. Developer immersion in use means that designers are themselves competent practitioners in the specific user domain (such as a sport or a professional activity). This allows the designer to draw from a rich pool of understanding about who the other end-users are, what requirements they have, what the contexts of use are, and so on. In effect, immersed designers can design for themselves and their peers, and have easy access to gain whatever new information is needed, as well as easy access to checking and testing solutions. Prototypical instances of developer immersion can be found from well-documented industry cases (Heiskanen et al. 2010; Schweisfurth and Raasch 2015), where designers have been users designing for their peers in media services and consumer goods. Such participation is typically limited in scale but often has extensive duration. A well-known example of designer immersion in use is Suunto Wristtop computers. The initial design project utilized marketing research and HCD, but the whole product development team were also active in the sports they were designing for. Drawing primarily from their hobbyist knowing the team questioned the user and market research insights and shifted the customer group focus from high-end sports to ‘sports wannabee’ market and designed the product accordingly, resulting in a success story (Heiskanen et al. 2010).

The second form is the design of culturally mature products and services (Williams, Slack, and Stewart 2005), such as tables, chairs, mugs, or artefact genres such as ATMs. In such cases, both designers and users are already deeply familiar with the typical usages and contexts of these artefacts through thousands of encounters with them. The designer’s participation in a shared domain can effectively act as the primary means of achieving responsible design. Additional insights and inspiration have been shown to still emerge from studying users and their contexts, and involving them in ideation, for example, through probes (Mattelmäki 2006). Here, it is important to stress that reliance on the ‘designer as user’ works only insofar as designers really have sufficient participation in the user domain (Figures 8 and 9).

Figure 8. Left: In investigation-based approaches designers study users in natural or laboratory settings and translate the insights into product/service characteristics. Middle: In user inspiration approaches, designers are versed in the user domain of culturally mature products/services. Right: developers hold dual membership in producer and user practices of new products.

Figure 9. Lighter user-involvement approaches with example variants, methods, and techniques.

A demarcation line for when it no longer makes sense to talk about user involvement runs across involving users in design and innovation and involving them for other purposes without direct connection to product, service, or system development activities. Manifold customer boards, citizen panels, patient representative groups, etc. involve users particularly in the public sector, but often with only a weak connection to design, but rather on just service delivery (Bovaird 2007). Another demarcation line runs across when it is sensible to talk about involvement as low-level information provision is involved in traditional market and customer surveys, in customer feedback to companies, in informal exchanges between staff and customers, and so on. Our rule of thumb in this paper has been that when such information gathering does not involve significant back-and-forth interchanges or other in-depth ways to engage with the (potential) users, it is best described as just gathering of market information. This is pronounced in cases of data tracking, data analytics, and use of customer information in customer relationship management (CRM) systems, which can be highly useful for gaining insights about users yet without involving them in any design-related activities (Johnson 2013). In contrast, some advanced customer research, for instance, may proceed through in-depth interviewing or ethnographic engagement with users and thus lands in the user inspiration, UX, or HCD approach cluster in terms of its user-involvement configuration, despite its quite different origin and orientation (Hyysalo et al. 2016b). Figure 10, we thus mark some of the widely used methods and methodologies in grey to emphasize that they reside in the borderland of user involvement and may or may not fall within it depending on how they are conducted.

Figure 10. Mapping the range of approaches differentiated by their involvement configurations, the borderline of user involvement, and the spans of three large research/practice areas.

Wide-spanning research/practice areas in the mapping: service design, participatory design, and user-innovation research

One of the problems we emphasized in the critique part of the paper was that wide research and practice areas such as service design, participatory design, and user-innovation research are regularly misrepresented in the various method and approach mappings. We are now conceptually equipped to elaborate a key source of these misrepresentations, namely that these research and design practice areas are not confined to any one user-involvement approach but span several ones, typically owing to their historical evolution and influences from neighbouring research and practice areas.

Figure 10 elaborates the nine user-involvement configurations we have discussed in this paper and depicts their relation to three research areas that regularly cause confusion regarding how they stand with respect to user involvement. First of these traditions is user-innovation research (von Hippel 2005; von Hippel 2016). The thrust of this research and practice community is in capacitating users to innovate and turning their design and innovation activities to peer, company, or public-sector benefit. Examining its major communications outlet, Open and User Innovation conferences 2004–2022, the research spans from independent user innovators and independent user-innovation communities to ways in which companies can work with hosted user communities and onwards to various user-innovation toolkits and crowdsourcing platforms and contests (e.g. von Hippel and Katz 2002; Balka, Raasch, and Herstatt 2009; von Hippel 2005, 2016). But this research community does not pursue user-involvement configurations in which users do not perform independent design tasks.

Participatory design, as described above, has fostered synchronous co-located collaboration ever since the 1970s (Bjerknes, Ehn, and Kyng 1987; Bødker, Kensing, and Simonsen 2004) and extended design-in-use approaches since the beginning of the 2000s as well as liaisons with independent user-designer communities and initiatives to set up hosted user-designer communities and exploratory living labs particularly in the public sector (e.g. Hillgren, Seravalli, and Emilson 2011; Botero and Saad-Sulonen 2010). Some of the public-space projects also feature small, independent user designs that would fall within host-coordinated user design (e.g. Hyysalo and Hyysalo 2018; Simon 2010). Participatory design thus engages in five distinct types of user-involvement configurations, even though it should be noted that in comparison with user-innovation research, it is more hands on when it engages with user communities to, for instance, infrastructure with them (e.g. Karasti, Baker, and Millerand 2010; Hillgren, Seravalli, and Emilson 2011).

In turn, service design has a wide application area that includes several types of design and research that feature very different user-involvement configurations. At one end, service-design agencies make incremental space, service encounter, and digital app designs in which user involvement remains inspirational or absent (Patrício et al. 2011). In more encompassing service-design projects, users are investigated and designs tested in a user-involvement configuration typical of UX and HCD. Many, particularly Scandinavian, service design projects feature workshops with users and stakeholders as the prime user-insight method (e.g. Hyvärinen, Lee, and Mattelmäki 2015), landing in collaborative design configuration. Finally, some digital service design, particularly when pursued through agile development and early releases, proceeds with extended design-in-use (e.g. Johnson 2013). In all, owing to its deployment in spatial, physical services, and digital services – all with their distinct development processes – service design presents a prime example of a research and practice area that is so diffuse regarding its user-involvement configurations that any attempt to isolate commonalities across a small set of prototypical methodology is unlikely to succeed. Yet the user focus is arguably the most defining characteristic of service design regardless of the way in which it is pursued, and a better understanding of the different roles and mechanisms of users involvement factually deployed within service design is key to better orienting service designers to different facets of their trade (see Figure 10).

Table 4 further condenses the key differences in roles of designers and user-knowledge users in different user-involvement configurations, and exemplifies, for instance, that the commonly observed problems in how users become recruited to participate, and the regrettable omissions from participation that easily result, concern particularly the collaborative design and HCD/UX configurations in which designer roles imply most agency in users’ involvement to some contrast to community-based approaches in which wide and open participation is typically possible (Freeman 2011; Johnson 2013).

Table 4. Designer and user roles in different user-involvement configurations.

Designer–user configuration	Designer role	User role	Role of user knowledge	Information arrangements	Solution outcome
User inspirtion	Creative professional	Muse	Enhancing designer vision and imagination	Designers’ own experience complemented by involving or studying users	Insights that designers turn to concepts and into production
Designer immersion	Design and user expert	Peer, informant	Grounding for design	Immersion in both user and producer practices and contexts	Insights that designers turn to concepts and into production
Investigating use and users (HCD, UX)	Investigator, protector and developer of users’ life	Subject of investigation	Grounding for design and evaluation	Observation, interviewing, task analysis, UX testing, etc.	Insights that designers turn to concepts and into production
Collaborative design	Organizer, facilitator, design realization	Design participant, expert of one’s life	Users’ knowledge is brought to design	Co-located workshops, site visits, etc.	Shared design decisions that designers turn to concepts and into production
Extended design-in-use	Organizer, facilitator, design realization	Design participant, additive designer	Users’ solutions and knowledge responded to	Design in use and information passed about it	Ideas, requests, and solutions iterated into evolving system or service
Coordinated user design	Platform designer	Additive designer	Users’ knowledge is the starting point for their solutions	Platform or toolkit that fits the producer process	Independent design additions
User communities (HYBRID, INDIE)	Facilitator, supporter, peer designer	Designer, realisator, participant	Starting point	Passed between participants	Evolving product or system

Conclusions

The proliferation of user involvement and related methods and approaches has accentuated the need to better categorize them. We demonstrate how the presently available ways of doing such categorizations feature shortcomings, particularly owing to an undifferentiated treatise between approaches, methodologies, methods, and techniques as well as problematic principles for differentiating and arranging them. We proposed that the most instructive and least misleading mappings could be produced at the scale of approaches, based on the graded membership of methodologies within approaches and the implied developer–user configurations.

Such mapping reveals important and often neglected differences in scale and temporal dynamics in user involvement. It provides a discipline-agnostic way to highlight important differences in user-involvement configurations that have sprouted during the last 20 years. We believe this is an antidote to common (mis)perceptions among practitioners, academics, and students of what is involved in different ways of pursuing user involvement.

In practical projects – both our own and others – the purposeful hybridization, mixing, and sequential deployment of different engagement registers is common (cf. Botero 2013; Johnson 2013; Hyysalo, Jensen, and Oudshoorn 2016a; Hyysalo et al. 2016b; Hyysalo and Hyysalo 2018). Yet our experience is that the type of differentiating we pursue in this paper is most needed exactly when such a shift in designer–user relations takes place in the course of the project: without clarifying devices, project participants fail to recognize that a new sensitivity or a new kind of means, roles, or timeframe for unfolding the work is needed.

The above typology is not without its own limitations. The prototype and class constructions cannot be as evenly empirically derived as one might wish. Some of the old and academically rooted ones are well-recognized labels with clear definitions and many methodologies within the cluster – for instance in HCD, UX, collaborative design, and open-design communities. In contrast, some no less important practitioner’s commonly used approaches such as designer immersion in use are far less academically defined. Some categories are emerging and hold overlapping ‘native’ terminology, currently particularly in the methodologies to extending design-in-use and host-coordinated user design.

We also wish to underscore that user-involvement configurations are at the end of the day deployed for different project objectives and contexts. The root reasons such as corporate profit vs citizen empowerment continue to matter also in how methodologies instantiate approaches, as do particular strategic considerations and mundane practicalities in how a method or a project is set up (Hyysalo and Hyysalo 2018; Botero et al. 2020; von Busch and Palmås 2023). It is foreseeable that new ways to user involvement continue to emerge and stand out from the established user-involvement configurations. Helping designers, students, and fellow academics to recognize what indeed is novel and how exactly it is then novel is foremost what we hope to have contributed with this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sampsa Hyysalo

Sampsa Hyysalo, PhD, is professor of CoDesign in Aalto University, Department of Design. His research investigates designer-user relations in sociotechnical change and the new forms of by which design participation can be pursued.

Mikael Johnson

Mikael Johnson, Dr. Sc.(Tech), focused his dissertation and post-doc on the role of the user in service design and product development. Currently data scientist at Yle, enabling business intelligence and customer insight.