The objective of this workshop is to involve the users in the design process. In this workshop session, we want to take part in the design activity along with our users. We provide our users with materials for them to descriptively discuss their personal experience and express the solutions. We believe that this activity will help us to communicate with our users and better discover what they know and feel.

1. Bringing users into your process
through Participatory Design
by
Kartik Rao
Research Method Case Study
H561 Meaning and Form in HCI

2. Context
A pilot study for
MIHA(Multimodal
Intelligent Health
Assistant) that can assist
older adults in managing
their health record and
medications.

3. What do I mean by participatory design

4. a simple definition
“Participatory Design represents an approach towards computer
systems design in which the people destined to use the system play a
critical role in designing it.” – Schuler and Namioka, 1993
…but it is often a lot more complicated than this!

5. What?
• Participatory design brings your end users into the design process,
usually in a workshop format.
• Also called as Co-designing.

6. Why Participatory Design?
• Uncover users needs and mental models
• Creative and hands-on process – gives you amazing artifacts to refer
• Helps you find real problems and make sure you’re designing the right
thing

7. Participatory design process
Framing
Identify research goals,
objectives, questions,
and hypotheses
Planning
Define activities to use
to help to
prove/disprove your
hypotheses
Facilitating
Practice for moderating
participatory research
sessions with users
Analyzing
Ways to make sense of
your research results,
which will jumpstart your
next design iteration
Source: Frog Design

8. When to use?
• Beginning of the project
• Middle of the project
Design exploration phase
Foundation
Understand Needs
Generation
Create the design
Evaluation
Refine the design
Fig. Participatory design flow

9. How to use?
Preconditioning Participatory session Conversation and Analysis
1 2 3

10. Preconditioning
• Demographic questionnaire
• Understand the problems
• Discuss methods to solve the problems
• Affinity diagrams
1

11. What did I learn?
This good for
Understanding user needs,
barriers, mental model and
opportunities.
This not good for
Prioritizing features

12. Participatory session
• Form multiple teams.
• Ask every team to create a
quick + hand drawn design
solution.
• You as a researcher involve with
the teams.
2

13. Participant’s creation

14. Conversation and Analysis
• Ask open ended questions
• Why is that important?
• How do you use that?
• Could you say more about that?
• Can you give me an example?
• Understand the meaning behind the
elements.
• Understand why they’re doing
things, and what order?
3

15. What did I learn?
This good for
Gathering information,
hierarchy and user needs.
This not good for
Creating final design solution.

16. Insights
• Participatory design – a good method for extracting deep and
unspoken user concerns
• Early in design process, Participatory Design can act as investigation
tool
• Once you learn more about the problem you are solving, Participatory
Design can act as a generative tool

17. Thank you

18. References
• Participatory Design: Principles and Practices by Douglas Schuler
• Lindsay, S., Brittain, K., Jackson, D., Ladha, C., Ladha, K., & Olivier, P. (2012). Empathy, participatory design and people with
dementia. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '12.
doi:10.1145/2207676.2207749
• http://katiemccurdy.com/participatory-design/
• http://uxmag.com/articles/participatory-design-in-healthcare