Worth-Centered Design in Practice: Lessons from Experience and Research Agenda

Abstract

Worth-Centered Design (WCD) provides designers with six principles, five "D"s, a framework, and a set of tools, techniques, and methods for designing interactive systems that deliver worth. Despite its potential, WCD has not received much attention: the related literature is not intensive and the design methodology has not been investigated in many actual design settings. The community lacks of experience with WCD. This paper first compiles the state-of-the-art on WCD and then relates the worth-centered design of Cocoon, a mobile and context-aware application. It presents further insights about the notion of worth and provides the community with nine lessons from experience for informing future worth-centered designs. Worth maps appear as a treasure also for worth assessment over time, giving rise to the ARROW (Appreciations, Requirements and Rationale Of Worth) framework and research perspectives.

Bringing Worth Maps a Step Further: A Dedicated Online-Resource

“…In [2], the authors relate their complete operationalization of the WCD framework through the development of Cocoon, phase by phase. In order to fulfill the lack of a concrete methodology for worth mapping, faced at 'design' phase, the authors propose the ARROW (Appreciations, Requirements and Rationale Of Worth) frame-work, which also suggests different types of classes of elements and connections for WMs.…”

“…The ARROW Framework ARROW (initially PEW [3]) was developed during the development of Cocoon, a mobile and context-aware application. The ARROW framework addresses worth as a twofold notion: 'Appreciated Worth' vs. 'Requested Worth' [2]. Appreciated Worth represents the positive aspects of the interactive system (i.e., the strengths).…”

“…In [2] also, worth mapping is combined with other HCI techniques for data collection purposes: semi-structured interviews at the 'study of needs' phase and a field study followed by group interviews at 'evaluation' phase. Camara and Calvary showed that WMs could support: User Interface (UI) and interaction design, graphic design, and software implementation.…”

“…The design cases considered for the worth mapping experience were selected in order to investigate worth maps in different application domains and design stages (see Table 1): Lyric 2 ' 3 (a heating controller system), Colibri 4 (an advanced planning system) [4], FutureID 5 (an identity management system), and Cocoon (a mobile and context-sensitive system) [2]. Furthermore, our literature review revealed that most worth mapping experiences relied on user-centered approaches to collect worth elements and understand connections between them (see section 2.3).…”

“…If there is a consensus on worth maps benefits for design, examples of existing WMs are more diverse in terms of constituent elements. In order to shape the content of WMs, Camara and Calvary [2] proposed the ARROW framework and illustrated it using a concrete case. However, beyond, the ARROW framework has not received yet much attention.…”