Representations and user-developer interaction in cooperative analysis and design

Participatory design (PD) and task analysis (TA) have each been widely promoted as amelioratives to the problems of developing systems that meet users' requirements. However, PD methods have tended to focus on design perse, rather than also promoting user-developer cooperation in upstream analysis activities. TA methods have promoted these upstream activities but largely failed to involve users directly in the analysis and modelling work. Hence, there is a need for a broader approach that encourages user-developer cooperation throughout systems analysis and design activities. This article examines the support for user-developer interaction provided by representations of users' tasks and software designs in 2 real-world software development projects that followed a task-based cooperative development approach. In the course of the system development work, the representations were called on to serve a number of different purposes. Task model and paper prototype representations facilitated the development of commen ground among the members of the development team through the provision of an external shared model of the object of the development activity and helped to delimit an interaction space in which the cooperative activity was conducted. Weaknesses of the representations as supports for cooperative development included users' reluctance physically to amend the representations and the very strength of common ground developed between the participants that was not explicitly represented in the external models.

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