Persona logical thinking: improving requirements elicitation for multidisciplinary teams

Abstract

To be more successful, innovation projects need a multidisciplinary team to cross and challenge several knowledge fields and viewpoints. However, defining methods to be used by multidisciplinary design teams is not straightforward since a single method has to match different skills and personality types. Our main objective is to provide a new method suitable to such multidisciplinary teams. The goal of Study 1 is to highlight that designers’ specialty (i.e. engineer or ergonomist) has an impact on methods’ effectiveness. For that purpose, we selected two methods for requirement elicitation, one that is generally used by engineers (a subset of EPMcreate method based on logical structure) and one commonly used by ergonomists (the Persona method based on empathetic reasoning). These methods were tested by 10 ergonomists and 10 engineers during individual sessions. We subsequently developed a method called Persona Logical Thinking (PLT) based on the combination of the two previous methods. This new method was tested in Study 2, and compared to Persona method and to EPMcreate method during collective sessions involving four designers each (engineers, industrial designers and ergonomists). Nine design teams took part in the study with a total of 36 participants. Our results suggest that PLT method draws on the advantages of both logical and empathetic reasoning since it is as productive as POEPMcreate method and as relevant as Persona method. It may therefore be more appropriate for multidisciplinary design teams.

Keywords:

• Requirement elicitation
• methods and tools
• multidisciplinary
• innovation