Generating shared understanding of product use in design teams

What is it about?

To be able to collectively take decisions with regard to usability and user experience, design team members need to create shared understanding of actual and desired product use. In this paper we show how the design teams we studied achieved this goal by actively exploring product use together in workshops, and collaboratively creating explicit representations of these explorations on paper.

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Why is it important?

Supporting multidisciplinary design teams in making design decisions with regard to product use will help these teams to generate products which result in better user experiences. Sharing knowledge of product use is an essential precondition for successful team decision-making. We show that instead of through sharing explicit representations such as reports, teams create shared understanding by collectively exploring product use in workshops in which they create these representations together.