Designers, users and a shared understanding of the product

A case study with product designers

Conference paper (2009)

Authors

Anna Mieczakowski Mieczakowski University of Cambridge
Patrick Langdon Langdon University of Cambridge
P.J. Clarkson University of Cambridge
Affiliation
External organisation
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

2009

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Affiliation

External organisation

Abstract

This paper describes the results of a detailed study which included a literature review and twenty semi-structured interviews with product designers from a large telecommunications company. The company studied has a lot of experience in product design and consistently produces high quality, usable and competitive products. In essence, the study investigated the nature and structure of users' cognitive representations of products and the ways in which designers currently go about matching their intended design of products with the users' understanding of those products. The findings from the study indicate that designers have often very little time, limited financial resources, and not enough support to take notice of users' understanding of products as much as they would like to. Moreover, no appropriate tool for predicting inclusive interaction between products and users is currently used across the organisation. However, the interviewed designers expressed high interest in using such a tool. Further research will evaluate existing tools for modelling the match between the conceptual models of designers and users and find an appropriate tool for facilitating inclusive interaction.