RECORD

Participatory design 2.0 – user involvement through social media

October 15, 2010 on 5:05 am | By Asbjørn | In All categories | 3 Comments

At Yggdrasil 2010, the main Norwegian conference on usability and user documentation, I held a presentation called Participatory design 2.0. This title  spurred the interest of at least one non-Norwegian  speaking  Slideshare reader, and in consequence I will give a brief summary here.

The history of Participatory design (PD) may be interpreted as one of rise (80′es and early 90′es) and decline (mid 90′es ->). The source of PD is the Scandinavian tradition, where the development and implementation of interactive systems at the workplace was seen as a political activity requiring the democratic involvement of the  workers. As Pelle Ehn states it in a chapter in the classic  Participatory design: “Every human should have the right to participate equally in decisions concerning his or her life”. Early PD successes, as the project with the Norwegian Iron and metal workers union in the 70′es and UTOPIA in the 80′es, typically saw system development as a cooperative activity between skilled workers and their unions,  system owners and system developers. In order to facilitate user involvement, pioneering use of methods was applied – such as the use of mock-ups, role-play, future workshops, and co-operative prototyping.

Gradually, user involvement in PD processes were seen more as a pragmatic approach to improve system usability, and less as an activity with the political aim of industrial democracy. As Bergvall-Kåreborn and Ståhlbröst found in their survey of the PD conference articles of 2006, only one in the 15 conference papers that year presented a study with a democratic motive for participation.  This shift towards pragmatic motivation for PD is parallel in time to what I find to be declining awareness of PD among usability researchers and practitioners. Possibly, this pragmatic shift makes it difficult to differentiate PD from other user-oriented traditions, such as user-centred design.

Also, the world of system development has changed dramatically since the golden days of PD. For the majority of IT solutions being developed, it is no longer feasible to involve the intended user base in a democratic fashion. One obvious reason for this is the size and distributed nature of the user base for most interactive systems of today; it is either impractical or impossible to involve a fair share of the intended users in the development process.

The distributed nature the user base and the shift towards pragmatic motivation may be seen as important causes for the decline of PD. However, social media may possibly change the game back in favor for PD.  At least when it comes to overcoming the challenge of a large and distributed user base.

The growth of social media has made clear to the world something that PD researchers and practitioners have known all along: Users are (at their best) engaged, knowledgeable, and creative.   Social media also provide an opportunity to involve users in innovation and development. For ideation, such as Starbucks and Dell has done for some years already, or for feedback in development processes as we have done in the RECORD project.

In RECORD we have run several cases where users are invited to provide design feedback through a social media environment. Designs have been presented to users, who in turn have provided feedback as comments and ratings. Different cases have covered feedback on ideas, concepts, visual prototypes and beta-versions. We have learnt that the feedback provide insight in (a) the users general experience of the design, (b) aspects of the design that are particularly well liked,  (c) problems, (d) design suggestions, and (e) context information (such as situations for use). Also, through social media it is possible to (a) gather user feedback on a larger amount of ideas, concepts or solutions and (b) gather user feedback in the early phases of ideation and concept design. We have for example run cases where users provide feedback on >20 ideas for new solutions – which enables user involvement in a phase of development typically reserved for the designers and the core project team.

Not all the design feedback we get through social media is  gold – some of it is actually quite non-constructive.  But some is good and valuable. We are currently in the process of analyzing data to find out whether some types of users provide better feedback in others. In particular we investigate whether users with lead user characteristics (as defined by von Hippel)  provide better feedback.

In conclusion, social media seem to represent renewed attention to the users as a source of knowledge and creativity in system development. If so, social media used for PD purposes – Participatory design 2.0 – may represent the potential for a renewal in the interest also for PD. When involving users in development processes through social media, we for sure have lots to learn from the PD tradition.

Currently, the involvement of users in innovation and development is mainly pragmatic. However, it is conceivable that future uses of social media for such purposes also may be motivated politically. This remains to be seen. Maybe we have a new golden age of PD ahead of us.