Structured Brainstorming Helps Home Network Managers Transcend Technical Language Barriers to Express Their Needs

Managing home networks is fraught with usability challenges due, in part, to the adoption of conventions, tools, and terminology meant for professional network administration. Eliciting user needs is challenging because of the gulf between the language used by network professionals and the less precise, unstandardized terms used by home administrators. Here we modify a traditional Structured Brainstorming (SB) technique to help circumvent these thorny communication problems. We describe our specific implementation and provide a sample of the information obtained from our SB sessions.