Bringing users into your process through Participatory Design

by

Kartik Rao

Research Method Case Study

H561 Meaning and Form in HCI

Context

A pilot study for MIHA(Multimodal Intelligent Health Assistant) that can assist older adults in managing their health record and medications.

What do I mean by participatory design

a simple definition

“Participatory Design represents an approach towards computer systems design in which the people destined to use the system play a critical role in designing it.” – Schuler and Namioka, 1993

…but it is often a lot more complicated than this!

What?

• Participatory design brings your end users into the design process, usually in a workshop format.

• Also called as Co-designing.

Why Participatory Design?

• Uncover users needs and mental models

• Creative and hands-on process – gives you amazing artifacts to refer

• Helps you find real problems and make sure you’re designing the right thing

Participatory design process

Framing

Identify research goals, objectives, questions,

and hypotheses

Planning

Define activities to use to help to

prove/disprove your hypotheses

Facilitating

Practice for moderating participatory research

sessions with users

Analyzing

Ways to make sense of your research results,

which will jumpstart your next design iteration

Source: Frog Design

When to use?

• Beginning of the project

• Middle of the projectDesign exploration phase

FoundationUnderstand Needs

GenerationCreate the design

EvaluationRefine the design

Fig. Participatory design flow

How to use?

Preconditioning Participatory session Conversation and Analysis

1 2 3

Preconditioning

• Demographic questionnaire

• Understand the problems

• Discuss methods to solve the problems

• Affinity diagrams

1

What did I learn?

This good for

Understanding user needs, barriers, mental model and opportunities.

This not good for

Prioritizing features

Participatory session

• Form multiple teams.

• Ask every team to create a quick + hand drawn design solution.

• You as a researcher involve with the teams.

2

Participant’s creation

Conversation and Analysis

• Ask open ended questions• Why is that important?

• How do you use that?

• Could you say more about that?

• Can you give me an example?

• Understand the meaning behind the elements.

• Understand why they’re doing things, and what order?

3

What did I learn?

This good for

Gathering information, hierarchy and user needs.

This not good for

Creating final design solution.

Insights

• Participatory design – a good method for extracting deep andunspoken user concerns

• Early in design process, Participatory Design can act as investigation tool

• Once you learn more about the problem you are solving, Participatory Design can act as a generative tool

Thank you

References

• Participatory Design: Principles and Practices by Douglas Schuler

• Lindsay, S., Brittain, K., Jackson, D., Ladha, C., Ladha, K., & Olivier, P. (2012). Empathy, participatory design and people with dementia. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '12. doi:10.1145/2207676.2207749

• http://katiemccurdy.com/participatory-design/

• http://uxmag.com/articles/participatory-design-in-healthcare