Remote participatory design
28 Jun 2011 - 5:30am
3 replies
1061 reads
Al McFarland
2008
I am looking to conduct a series of requirements discovery exercises and would like to use a "team" participatory design approach. The catch is that these exercises must be conducted remotely.
After doing a little research on the web, seems that any kind of software tool or integrated tools (e.g., card sorting) can handle only one participant at a time, and there is no provision for the participant to create their own sort items, or ability to create an arbitrary oranization of card objects on the UI screen surface.
Does anyone know of remote software tools that will support multiple concurrent participants, free listing of sort items, and arbitrary x,y positioning of card objects?
Thanks in advance,
Al
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Hi Al,try Edistorm. Users have to sign up for a free account but then you can have real time online collaboration, brain storming, sorting. very cool.Marcy
From: Al McFarland <5752.nj@comcast.net>
To: acadia0@yahoo.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 6:33 AM
Subject: [IxDA] Remote participatory design
I am looking to conduct a series of requirements discovery exercises and would like to use a "team" participatory design approach. The catch is that these exercises must be conducted remotely.
After doing a little research on the web, seems that any kind of software tool or integrated tools (e.g., card sorting) can handle only one participant at a time, and there is no provision for the participant to create their own sort items, or ability to create an arbitrary oranization of card objects on the UI screen surface.
Does anyone know of remote software tools that will support multiple concurrent participants, free listing of sort items, and arbitrary x,y positioning of card objects?
Thanks in advance,
Al
Hello Al!
I'm researching this type of tools and I know they are very scarce. The best you can do is to adapt generic tools to your needs.
Google Docs can do a lot of good stuff if you provide a document template for users. It's very reliable, comparing to others.
MindMeister can also afford realtime collab and it provides a very nice version timeline, but it's restricted to the hierarchical mindmap format (that could be suited for a taxonomy) http://www.mindmeister.com/
And the most flexible I know is http://cacoo.com/ but I don't know if it's reliable enough.
I recommend you to use a second channel for backup, like Skype or chat to help people detect and correct connection synchronization problems that is very common in this systems.
--
.
.{ Frederick van Amstel }.
http://fredvanamstel.com
Faber-Ludens Interaction Design Institute
http://www.faberludens.com
Take a look at http://innovationgames.com/. I haven't tried it myself yet, but they have some of the games featured in the book Gamestorming.