Up and Down Side of Participatory Design
The up side
- Users are good at reacting to suggested system designs.
However, the designs must be concrete and visible for users to understand
them well enough to be able to grasp their meaning and the way the
interface will function.
- Users can contribute important common knowledge (from the task domain).
The designers may have so little knowledge about the task domain that they
miss the most obvious aspects of the user's work environment.
- The participating users may become advocates for the system.
A small group of enthousiasts among a large user population may have a
significant impact on the global acceptance of and satisfaction with the
final product.
The down side
- It is hard to get a good pool of end users.
You need a group of users covering the spectrum from novice and
casual user to expert frequent user.
It is often difficult to get good novice or casual users because they
may be afraid they will perform poorly and be judged upon that.
- Users are not expert designers.
They have difficulties presenting design ideas or imagining what is or
isn't possible with graphical user-interfaces.
Their imagination needs to be stimulated by means of examples.
- The user is not always right.
The user should get what she wants, but the problem is that she doesn't
always know what she wants because she doesn't know what possibilities there
are.
Especially for complex tasks, the user may express the wish for a user-interface
that requires no learning, but a somewhat more difficult interface which
needs to be learned but leads to much better performance may be better.
However, the design and development iterations should not be over
until the user is satisfied and agrees that the final design is
what she wants.