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Towards formalised end-user participation in information systems development process: bridging the gap between participatory design and ISD methodologies

Published: 01 August 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Creating requirements specifications is one of the most challenging tasks in the systems development. For a complete specification, different kinds of information are gathered. This includes information about the domain and context specific technical issues, and about multifaceted cultural, political, communicational, motivational, and personal issues. As there is no information systems development (ISD) method that would yield such information comprehensively, it could be achieved by user-oriented approaches, for instance by participatory design (PD). Reciprocally, unfortunately those do not provide detailed instructions for the systems development. In this paper, we will present our experiences from two research projects where user participation was emphasised in the ISD process. We argue that a multi-methodological ISD approach that utilises prototyping and a set of different communication means for gathering and elucidating requirements in a workplace would produce better systems from the end-users point of view. Further, these experiences can be used when developing a formalised user-oriented ISD method.

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      PDC '06: Proceedings of the ninth conference on Participatory design: Expanding boundaries in design - Volume 1
      August 2006
      149 pages
      ISBN:159593460X
      DOI:10.1145/1147261
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 01 August 2006

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      Author Tags

      1. CSCW
      2. ISD methods
      3. end-users
      4. information systems development
      5. participatory design

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      PDC'06: Expanding Boundaries in Design
      August 1 - 5, 2006
      Trento, Italy

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