Establishing shared understanding of product use through collaboratively generating an explicit frame of reference

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that there is a need to improve usability-related decision-making in product development teams to prevent usability problems in the final product. Those decisions are heavily influenced by the knowledge those teams have of future use situations and expected usability issues. Our previous research showed that design team members often implicitly hold this type of knowledge, but do not share it within the team. This lack of a shared understanding of product use negatively influences the decision-making process. In this paper we present the iterative development of a set of guidelines to support design teams in sharing knowledge of product use through the generation of flexible, explicit and evolving frames of reference. A series of studies in which the guidelines were evaluated suggest that particularly the activity of collaboratively creating the explicit frame of reference contributes to a shared understanding of product use.

Keywords::

• user-centred design
• design method
• design representation
• industrial design
• collaborative design

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all students of the University of Twente who participated in the design projects for their enthusiasm and valuable feedback on the guidelines. We also thank Bongo Innovations BV and Philips Consumer Lifestyle for providing the cases for these projects. Furthermore, we would like to express our gratitude to all design practitioners who participated in the iterative development and evaluation of the Envisioning Use workshop. Finally we thank Stella Boess and Christelle Harkema for their indispensable contribution to the development of the Envisioning Use technique.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation [grant number IOP IPCR 0631].