/pdf/online-communities-designing-usability-supporting-1rx78h3t04.pdf

Online communities – Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .166Just Add Users and Stir? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .166Major Bibliographic Sources for Participatory Design . . .167

Participatory design: the third space in HCI

User involvement is a widely accepted principle in development of usable systems. However, it is a vague concept covering many approaches. This study first clarifies the nature of user involvement and its expected benefits, and secondly reviews three streams of research, to evaluate the benefits and problems of varied user involvement approaches in practice. The particular focus of this study is on the early activities in the development process. An analysis of the literature suggests that user involvement has generally positive effects, especially on user satisfaction, and some evidence exists to suggest that taking users as a primary information source is an effective means of requirements capture. However, the role of users must be carefully considered and more cost-efficient practices are needed for gathering users' implicit needs and requirements in real product development contexts.

User involvement: A review of the benefits and challenges

This book gathers chapters from some of the top international empirical software engineering researchers focusing on the practical knowledge necessary for conducting, reporting and using empirical methods in software engineering. Topics and features include guidance on how to design, conduct and report empirical studies. The volume also provides information across a range of techniques, methods and qualitative and quantitative issues to help build a toolkit applicable to the diverse software development contexts

/pdf/guide-to-advanced-empirical-software-engineering-2f0my2wuh8.pdf

Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering

The recent shift of emphasis to user experience (UX) has rendered it a central focus of product design and evaluation. A multitude of methods for UX design and evaluation exist, but a clear overview of the current state of the available UX evaluation methods is missing. This is partly due to a lack of agreement on the essential characteristics of UX. In this paper, we present the results of our multi-year effort of collecting UX evaluation methods from academia and industry with different approaches such as literature review, workshops, Special Interest Groups sessions and an online survey. We have collected 96 methods and analyzed them, among other criteria, based on the product development phase and the studied period of experience. Our analysis reveals development needs for UX evaluation methods, such as early-stage methods, methods for social and collaborative UX evaluation, establishing practicability and scientific quality, and a deeper understanding of UX.

User experience evaluation methods: current state and development needs

https://research.aalto.fi/files/2082876/IwCKujala2011manuscript.pdf

UX Curve: A method for evaluating long-term user experience

Sustainable product-service systems for clothing: exploring consumer perceptions of consumption alternatives in Finland

Requirements prioritization is recognized as an important activity in product development. In this paper, we describe the current state of requirements prioritization practices in two case companies and present the practical challenges involved. Our study showed that requirements prioritization is an ambiguous concept and current practices in the companies are informal. Requirements prioritization requires complex context-specific decision-making and must be performed iteratively in many phases during development work. Practitioners are seeking more systematic ways to prioritize requirements but they find it difficult to pay attention to all the relevant factors that have an effect on priorities and explicitly to draw different stakeholder views together. In addition, practitioners need more information about real customer preferences.

Requirements prioritization challenges in practice

User involvement has been shown to be beneficial in the development of useful and usable systems. The trend of software development becoming a product-oriented activity creates challenges to user involvement. Field studies appear a promising approach, but the analysis of the gathered user needs has been shown to be demanding. This study presents, on the basis of seven case studies, an early user-involvement process showing how user needs can be analysed and how the input to product development can be identified. In addition, the process is evaluated in two industrial cases with interviews and a questionnaire. The results show that the process supports effective early user involvement; the resulted requirements were evaluated as being more successful and their quality as better than average in a company. However, the case studies show that user involvement not only provides useful information about users' needs but also increases the understanding of users' values.

/pdf/effective-user-involvement-in-product-development-by-4y3wya3syv.pdf

Sari Kujala

Papers

User involvement: A review of the benefits and challenges

UX Curve: A method for evaluating long-term user experience

Sustainable product-service systems for clothing: exploring consumer perceptions of consumption alternatives in Finland

Requirements prioritization challenges in practice

Effective user involvement in product development by improving the analysis of user needs