In our meeting elicitation scenario, the
participants
play the roles of employees in an electronics company that
decides to develop a new type of television remote control
because the ones found in the market are not user friendly,
as well as being unattractive and old-fashioned. The
participants are told they are joining a design team whose
task, over a day of individual work and group meetings, is
to develop a prototype of the new remote control. We
chose design teams for this study for several reasons.
First, they have functional meetings with clear goals,
making it easier to measure effectiveness and efficiency.
Second, design is highly relevant for society, since it is a
common task in many industrial companies and has clear
economic value. Finally, for all teams, meetings are not
isolated events but just one part of the overall work cycle,
but in design teams, the participants rely more heavily on
information from previous meetings than in other types of
teams, and so they produce richer possibilities for the
browsing technology we are developing.
Participants and Roles
Within this context, each participant in the elicitation is
given a different role to play. The project manager (PM)
coordinates the project and has overall responsibility. His
job is to guarantee that the project is carried out within
time and budget limits. He runs the meetings, produces
and distributes minutes, and produces a report at the end
of the trial. The marketing expert (ME) is responsible for
determining user requirements, watching market trends,
and evaluating the prototype. The user interface designer
(UI) is responsible for the technical functions the remote
control provides and the user interface. Finally, the
industrial designer (ID) is responsible for designing how
the remote control works including the componentry. The
user interface designer and industrial designer jointly have
responsibility for the look-and-feel of the design.
For this elicitation, we use participants who are neither
professionally trained for design work nor experienced in
their role. It is well-known that expert designers behave
differently from novices. However, using professional
designers for our collection would present both economic
and logistical difficulties. Moreover, since participants
will be affected by their past experience, all those playing
the same role should have the same starting point if we are
to produce replicable behaviour. To enable the
participants to carry out their work while lacking
knowledge and experience, they are given training for
their roles at the beginning of the task, and are each
assigned a (simulated) personal coach who gives sufficient
hints by e-mail on how to do their job. Our past
experience with elicitations for similar non-trivial team
tasks, such as for crisis management teams, suggests that
this approach will yield results that generalise well to real
groups. We intend to validate the approach for this data
collection both by the comparisons to other data already
described and by having parts of the data assessed by
design professionals.
The structure of the elicited data distinguishes four phases in the
design process:
- Project kick-off, consisting of building a project team
and getting acquainted with each other and the task.
- Functional design, in which the team sets the user
requirements, the technical functionality, and the
working design.
- Conceptual design, in which the team determines the
conceptual specification for the components,
properties, and materials to be used in the apparatus,
as well as the user interface.
- Detailed design, which finalizes the look-and-feel
and user interface, and in which the result is
evaluated
We use these phases to structure our elicitation, with one
meeting per design phase. In real groups, meetings occur
in a cycle where each meeting is typically followed by
production and distribution of minutes, the execution of
actions that have been agreed on, and preparation of the
next meeting. Our groups are the same, except that for
practical reasons, each design project was carried out in
one day rather than over the usual more extended period,
and we included questionnaires that will allow us to
measure process and outcomes throughout the day.
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2006
by AMI project, All Rights Reserved.