Software-supported Participatory Design: Design and Evaluation of the Tool PDot

Participatory Design (PD) is a common software development approach that actively includes end-users in the design process. This ensures tailored results and can lead to a strong feeling of ownership and overall empowers end-users. Commonly applied paper-based PD approaches have several shortcomings. A prototype presented on paper is not interactive for the end-user to experience it. Preparing PD ideas captured as physical artefacts (e.g. sketches on acetates) for further data analysis can be unduly time consuming. Using software tools to conduct PD activities instead of relying on paper-based methods can address these shortcomings. The author has been motivated to design, develop, and evaluate two such tools - PDotCapturer and PDotAnalyser. PDotCapturer is used by end-users participating in PD activities to create new designs from scratch or express (re-)design ideas. PDotAnalyser is used by designers to work with and further analyse the ideas captured. PDotCapturer is compared with similar paper-based approaches to evaluate the relative effectiveness of tool-based and paper-based PD activities in terms of quantity and quality of design ideas elicited. To perform this comparison, the coding scheme CAt+ (Categories plus Attributes) to rate the quality of PD ideas is developed. CAt+ can also be used to filter and aggregate PD ideas to support designers in making sense of as well as addressing such ideas for re-design. Results of the comparisons of paper-based and tool-based approaches show that paper is advantageous in some regards (e.g. number of ideas gathered), but the tool is comparable or in some regards outperforms paper (e.g. user preference). Given the additional advantages tool-usage can bring (e.g. automated analysis support), the context where paper-based or tool-based PD approaches suit better is discussed. For future work the use of PDotCapturer and PDotAnalyser in diverse and distributed settings will be explored.