Designing with dialogue charts: a qualitative content analysis of end‐user designers' experiences with a software engineering design tool

Abstract

Software engineering tools used by designers are critical to most systems development methodologies, and successful methodologies are critical to improved productivity. However, the way in which designers use and relate to software engineering tools, whether computer assisted or not, has received little attention in the design literature. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into how people perceive the process of using design tools. The study is a qualitative analysis of interview information from participants in a field experiment. Four teams of student designers used various design tools during the development of interactive information systems typical of those that might be developed by sophisticated endusers. The research reported here is an exploratory study aimed at understanding how designers use one of these tools, the dialogue charts. The broad range of purposes included the uses predicted by the reference literature on design. However, the end-user designers also used the tool opportunistically -they found a broader range of tool usage than the literature on design tools predicted. For example, they consistently used the tool as a communications vehicle among different phases of design and development. The results show that the relationships these 'end-user designers' developed with the target tool are expressed in highly emotional language. These attitudes are tightly coupled with the purposes for which the designers use the tool. The methodology uses a field experiment as a treatment and a semistructured interview with a hidden agenda for gathering data. h e data analysis techniques draw on the concepts of discovering grounded theory as described by Glaser and Straws. They further draw on the concepts of qualitative content analysis synthesized by Krippendodf and the qualitative data analysis methods described by Miles and Huberman.

Developing Theories in Information Systems Research: The Grounded Theory Method Applied

“…As a result, King offers a set of 12 thorough observations that help to better understand the dynamics surrounding software development projects and how CASE tools can help to address the respective challenges. Grounding his observations in extant literature, King shows that the technological benefits of CASE tools are in fact outweighed by the organizational Calloway and Ariav (1995), King (1996), Lundell and Lings (2003), Siau et al (2007) Urquhart et al Total 11 15 1 27 Group 1: papers that use GTM to build an IS-specific GT Group 2: papers that use GTM or elements of the method but do not build GT Group 3: papers that deal with GTs or GTM from a methodological standpoint and social factors surrounding the development projects. His 12 lessons highlight the effects of the latter.…”

“…As Strauss (1987) pointed out, there are many sources of data beyond observation alone. Existing GT studies in the IS field used data generation methods such as interviews (e.g., Calloway and Ariav 1995;Seeley and Targett 1997;Work 2002), participant observations, or ethnography (e.g., Ribes and Finholt 2009;Wales et al 2007), some forms of action research (e.g., Baskerville and Pries-Heje 1999;King 1996), informal conversations in the field (e.g., Goulielmos 2004;Volkoff et al 2005), focus groups (e.g., Palka et al 2009), or document analyses (e.g., Lundell and Lings 2003). Some of the papers just quoted also use a combination of two or more of these methods and build case studies (e.g., Levina and Vaast 2008) to support their grounded research projects.…”

Constructing user requirements: a social process for a social context

“…The training was highly evaluated and there were positive comparisons to previously used methods (for example flowcharts and DFDs). Several participants commented that a requirements model could be used for many purposes other than systems development, also reported in Calloway and Ariav (1995). We therefore generate the following generalizations:…”

“…We now discuss researcher background as this may suggest bias to the reader (Calloway & Ariav, 1995). The evaluation team comprised the authors and two research students in information systems.…”

“…In our study there was a relatively small number (16) of participants. However, this is common in similar studies that evaluate a method or methods in a practical manner, such as in Gough et al (1995), Potts et al (1995), Vessey and Conger (1994) and Calloway and Ariav (1995), in which the numbers of participants were 8, 10, 6 and 16 respectively. These studies included developers or IT staff as well as users among the participants and did not differentiate their results.…”