Users are not designers, but design without user input frequently misses the mark and suffers from poor usability and lack of adoption by users. Therefore, designers and engineers should give users a role in designing new or improved systems. One way to do that is to ask participants in research sessions to draw their concept of the ideal web page or application screen. You shouldn’t feed them answers that they then capture and write down, because that defeats the purpose. You can, however, ask them how they expect to do certain tasks they’ve already said they want to do on the site. In this way, you are prompting their recall without giving them biased or predetermined answers.
Conducting participatory design exercises is much easier than getting stakeholders to agree to the sessions in the first place. In participatory design exercises I’ve conducted, results showed a surprising consistency. Using the results of other research exercises I’ve described previously in this blog, I was able to pull the participants’ concepts together into a coherent screen design that emphasized the consensus elements. This doesn’t mean that we took the participants’ design consensus as our final solution, but it was compelling to the project sponsors, and our resulting design had substantial anchors to customer mental models that made it difficult for non-substantiated design “arguments” to pull us off track.
In the next post, I’ll give an example script for a participatory design exercise for a resort user experience.
Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)
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