Mikael Runonen

Oscillating between extremes: a framework for mapping differing views on User eXperience

As User eXperience (UX) has grown to be a very popular term widely used by practitioners and academics alike in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), it has also diverged in definition and purpose. Currently, there are only a few publications that consider UX in the context of product development in larger organizations. This paper illustrates this issue with the help of a literature review and a case study conducted in a multinational ICT company. The purpose of this study was to investigate the understanding of UX across different units within the organization and the different meanings associated with the concept. The case study consisted of interviews across the organization and had a split agenda between finding out the organization of UX work and also the meaning of UX for the employees. Based on the interviews and literature, a framework is presented for organizing UX work in a product development environment. The framework suggests an inter-organizational approach that takes into consideration not only product development as such, but also other functions of the company, including brand strategy.

Digital war room for design

In this paper, we describe the requirements elicitation for a digital war room --- a group work facility to support people interacting with digital (and analog) materials. The target user group is product design teams and construction engineers/architects. Main requirements for an interactive group work space include fluent sharing of documents within the facility and ability to comment on them, support for both analog and digital sketching and writing by hand, minimum of three displays allowing parallel tasks and comparison of different alternatives and the importance of the physical properties of the facility.

Shaping the Future with Users --- Futures Research Methods as Tools for User-Centered Concept Development

We have identified four problems when developing futuristic concepts. Technologies cannot be used as boundaries for concept creation, there is a lot of room for surprises, user knowledge is bound to present day, and futuristic concepts are not easily communicable. We propose three methods from Futures Studies to tackle these problems, with the emphasis in developing futuristic product and service concepts in a business-to-business context. In this paper, we introduce the methods and discuss the possible benefits gained from their use.

Collaboration Space for Creative Knowledge Work – Analysis of Industrial Pilots

In this paper we describe our experiences piloting a collaboration space DiWa that supports creative group-based knowledge work. The developed prototypes of the system were piloted at three industry and public sector partners in Finland conducting product development and city zoning and at one research institute involved in service design in Beijing, China. The system design was based on extensive literature review, observations and interviews at the partners. The results presented in this paper are derived from four one month long pilots using the DiWa prototype that were studied using observations, interviews and questionnaires. Main results are the observed differences in the use of collaborative spaces and work practices between the Finnish users and their Chinese counterparts. The paper concludes with eight recommendations for the design of collaboration spaces.