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This work emphasises the long-standing focus on democratisation in the participatory design field by analysing how participation can be achieved (the pragmatics of participation) and how participation can be increased (the politics of participation) through malleable interactive prototyping. Malleable interactive prototyping refers to the design of digital prototypes of IT systems that are open enough for a designer and a user to collaboratively design and re-design. The interactiveness allows the user to experience the interaction with the system and its design and also allows for redesign during the interaction. This type of prototyping is explored in the collaborative design of an IT system between a designer and citizens at a hospital, and in a short series of co-design workshops with young learners as designers within a component of their digital competence education in upper secondary school. Through a qualitative analysis, this work demonstrates that malleable interactive prototyping increases participation and participatory design. Four conclusions are proposed for the participatory design field: malleable interactive prototyping gives users an informed voice in the design process, allows users to collaboratively design an IT system with a designer, facilitates mutual learning between designer and user, and increases the ecological validity of the collaborative design. Furthermore, the explorations contribute to the education field by showing that malleable interactive prototyping can explicate future use and the user as well as the role of the user and the IT system for young learners, thus enabling young learners to experience democratic IT systems design processes. These conclusions suggest that school policy writers should consider including a socio-technical perspective in the computational-focused curriculum and that educators should contemplate the delivery of this education across all programmes., This study explores the role of prototyping in the democratisation of IT systems design processes. It introduces malleable interactive prototyping, which involves the utilisation of prototypes that allow users to perform valuable tasks and experience the design but are still open enough to enable unexpected interaction patterns and to be collaboratively designed during the interaction. This approach is investigated through two studies: in a hospital, where citizens collaboratively designed an IT system with a designer, and in an upper secondary school, where pupils collaboratively designed IT systems with peers, revealing the prototyping’s potential to boost participation and learning. A qualitative analysis concluded that malleable interactive prototyping enhances participation by giving users an informed voice in the design process, facilitating collaborative design, fostering mutual learning between designer and user, and improving design validity. This approach has the potential to enhance learning for young learners—whether or not programming is in their curricula—by clarifying the future use of IT systems and the users’ role and providing experiences of democratic design processes. This suggests integrating socio-technical perspectives into the curriculum., Demokratisering av IT-systemdesignprocesser har länge varit en brännpunkt inom fältet deltagande design. Den här studien undersöker användares deltagande i systemdesign ur ett pragmatiskt (hur deltagande kan möjliggöras) och ett politiskt perspektiv (hur inriktningen av deltagande kan omfatta fler). Med formbar interaktiv prototyping åsyftas i den här studien utarbetandet av digitala prototyper som är öppna nog för att en designer och en användare tillsammans ska kunna designa prototypen samtidigt som prototyperna är interaktiva vilket låter användaren uppleva både interaktion med systemet och dess design. Interaktiviteten och öppenheten möjliggör omformning medan interaktionen pågår. Formbar interaktiv prototyping används i studien för att undersöka möjligheter att öka användares medverkan och för att öka omfattningen av deltagande design. Två studier har genomförts: samskapande av en applikation på ett sjukhus med medborgare som meddesigners, respektive deltagande design drivet av grupper av gymnasieelever som en del av deras digitala kompetensundervisning. Utifrån en kvalitativ analys förs fyra slutsatser riktade till fältet deltagande design fram: formbar interaktiv prototyping ger användare ett informerat inflytande i designprocessen, möjliggör för samskapande av IT-system mellan designer och användare, medför ett ömsesidigt lärande mellan designer och användare, och ökar samskapandets ekologiska validitet. Tre slutsatser relevanta för skolväsendet förs också fram: de formbara interaktiva prototyperna tydliggör den framtida användningen och användaren för elever; liksom vilka roller användaren och IT-systemet har under en interaktion, samt möjliggör för elever att uppleva demokratiskt utformade IT-systemdesignprocesser. De här slutsatserna utgör ett starkt argument för skolpolitiker att föra in ett vidare perspektiv på digital kompetens i läroplaner, och för skolledare och lärare att överväga hur undervisningen kan utformas för de olika utbildningsprogrammen.

Crisis training exercises play a vital role in preparing local and regional governments for the management of crises and disasters. Unfortunately, conducting sufficient training is demanding, especially in small municipalities, due to constrained time and personnel resources, but also complex planning and scheduling of the dominant on-site training methods. Virtual training has been suggested as a resource-efficient and flexible complement. However, despite numerous specifications of digital technology for training, research on organisational implementation and usage is lacking, indicating a low uptake. This article presents a cross-border R&D effort to facilitate the digitalisation of crisis management training by developing generic virtual tabletop exercises (VTTXs) to be shared via a repository, and (re-)used in, and adapted for, diverse contexts. The purpose of this article is to identify essential aspects in designing and conducting virtual tabletop exercises (VTTXs) for collaborative crisis management training.

Digital competence and programming have been part of the Swedish school curricula since 2018. This paper demonstrates how co-design design activities can be conducted as a way to provide digital competence education from a socio-technical perspective. Such activities were conducted with novice designers in three sessions, each with two school classes, from a Swedish engineering upper secondary school program in 2019. The students gained hands-on experience with interaction design and co-design as they designed a mobile application using a Wizard-of-Oz prototyping system and evaluated the prototype with users. This trial is used to argue that time allocation for socio-technical perspectives on digital competence in the Swedish school curricula can be expanded to be able to provide students with a more holistic view of digitization beyond technical issues.

Engrafting support staff into dialogues between users and customer support systems can compensate for system design flaws. Further, such dialogues can give grounds for system development. This article surveys the levels of interactivity of user support systems, where overt or covert support agents take an active part in the communication between a customer and a system. The main purpose is to demonstrate the prevailing lack of multimedia outputs in the tools supporting human intervention in systems with a graphical user interface (GUI). This is followed by an account of experimentation with human support engrafted in a web system that has a fuller range of GUI expression. The experiment explores the possibility of using multimedia in intervention in human-computer interaction and how such intervention can be built when it is not yet part of the augmented system.

Societal threats such as global warming and terror attacks make crisis preparedness and crisis training a major priority in governments worldwide. Unfortunately, training is limited, partly due to complex and resource-demanding planning of traditional exercises. Several crisis training software have been developed as a complement. However, reports in research on their usage are rare, which indicates that the diffusion is limited. A potential explanation is that the systems fail to meet important needs in the organizations and/or sound information systems (IS) design principles. This paper describes the first phase of a design science research (DSR) project aiming at developing information systems for disaster management (ISDM) training, and accompanying training methods in local and regional governments. The purpose of this paper is to investigate perceived problems in current crisis training and identify opportunities for ISDM training in the application domain. Another purpose is to outline expected artifacts in the project., CriseIT - Preparing for Future Crisis Management

Inom ramen för projektet CriseIT (www.criseit.org) har en intervjustudie genomförts med norska och svenska krisberedskapsaktörer. 19 respondenter från totalt 16 aktörer intervjuades om deras syn på behovet av krisövning, vad som fungerar bra och dåligt med de övningsmetoder som vanligtvis används, och vilken nytta de kunde se med datorbaserade övningsverktyg. Svaren visar på ett stort behov av att öva mer, gärna i form av mindre och kortare övningar. Det finns en rörelse bort från scenariobaserade övningar till övningar där olika förmågor står i centrum. Flertalet aktörer anser att de planerar och genomför övningar med gott resultat men att det saknas en systematik i hur utvärderingar leds vidare i ett förbättringsarbete. Det finns intresse men också tveksamhet inför att involvera allmänheten i krisövning, men ett sätt att hantera bland annat säkerhetsaspekter vore att gå via frivilligorganisationer som kan bistå med organisering och viss utbildning. Respondenterna visar stort intresse för datorbaserade övningsverktyg som ett medel för att öka krismedvetenheten och kunskapen som stödjer den egna rollen. De kan också se potentiella problem, t ex att vissa personer har svårt att ta till sig ny teknik och att det kan finnas risk att resurser till andra övningsformer minskas. Bland de fördelar som nämndes var möjlighet att öva oftare, med fler aktörer, och att öva på olika platser vid olika tidpunkter. Man ser också förbättrade möjligheter att öva utdragna kriser. Den målgrupp som lyfts fram som särskild intressant fördatorbaserade övningsverktyg är krisledningsorganisationen, dvs. den strategiskan ivån. Flera nämner också behovet av bättre planeringsstöd för säkerhets-/beredskapssamordnarna. En slutsats vi dragit är att det är viktigt att digitala krisövningsverktyg är webbaserade och bygger på standarder. Detta för att möjliggöra att verktygen kan användas distribuerat, i samarbete mellan olika organisationer och inte kräver lokala installationer i de olika hårt styrd, CriseIT

We present and discuss GUI-ii, Graphical User Interface interaction interview, a method used to remotely discuss, develop and test GUI prototypes with users and stakeholders. Examples of such sessions are presented to demonstrate that the main benefits of GUI-ii are that this way of co-designing allows for interaction-informed discussions around functions and user interfaces, where re-design and hands-on experience can be integrated and efficiently carried out remotely. Using a facilitation tool to enact GUI layout and responses allows participation and evaluation to take turns in participatory design processes in a productive way. We discuss this form of Participatory Design along the dimensions found in Sanders’ Map of Design Research. The discussion concludes that GUI-ii facilitates participation by relaxing demands for physical presence and by allowing people to participate from their own work environment while still making it easy for them to directly influence contents, structure and interaction., CriseIT

The Wizard-of-Oz method has been around for decades, allowing researchers and practitioners to conduct prototyping without programming. An extensive literature review conducted by the authors revealed, however, that the re-usable tools supporting the method did not seem to last more than a few years. While generic systems start to appear around the turn of the millennium, most have already fallen out of use. Our interest in undertaking this review was inspired by the ongoing re-development of our own Wizard-of-Oz tool, the Ozlab, into a system based on web technology. We found three factors that arguably explain why Ozlab is still in use after 15 years instead of the two-three years lifetime of other generic systems: the general approach used from its inception; its inclusion in introductory HCI curricula, and the flexible and situation-dependent design of the wizard’s user interface.

The Wizard-of-Oz method has been around for decades, allowing researchers and practitioners to conduct prototyping without programming. The extensive literature review in the field reported here, however, revealed that the re-usable tools supporting the method do not seem to last more than a few years. Generic systems started to appear around the turn of the millennium, but very few are still in use. New systems are designed nevertheless. The systems and issues presented here should be of interest to people in the field of prototyping interaction design. This review was inspired by the authors’ ongoing re-development of their own Wizard-of-Oz tool, the Ozlab, into a system based on web technology. The report takes stock of some key features of Ozlab as well as reviews and contrasts other re-usable Wizard-of-Oz tools with the ambition to list every generic tool. The introductory chapter compares and contrasts prototyping in general with Wizard-of-Oz prototyping and provides an historical overview of Wizard of Oz in the development of digital interactive systems, spanning the years 1971-2013. Chapter 2 briefly describes the operation of Ozlab, and Chapter 3 presents the literature review of generic WOz tools. Chapter 4 discusses how interaction is supported by WOz tools and Chapter 5 how platform dependency affects the longevity of generic tools, while Chapter 6 points to the limitations in the Wizard-of-Oz method itself from several perspectives. Chapter 7, finally, presents concluding remarks including a list of points for future methodological analysis and development., The pdf file is the 2:nd print with minor corrections, printed in March 2015. If you wish to read the first print and its corresponding list of errata, please contact forlag@kau.se.

This paper focuses on the ability to communicate public e-Services, as one part of e-Service evaluation. The purpose is to use and further develop the emerging concept of “communicability” to be used as a base in an evaluation tool in the context of public e-Services. The ability of citizens’ to find, understand and use the e-Services provided is return on investment for public sectors, governments and agencies. The point of departure in this paper is to elaborate on a test process design for data collection and analysis from an empirical driven approach. Empirical grounding is based on a Swedish municipality case with a pilot usability test with eye tracking in 2012 and a second further improved test sessions 2013 on e-Services with citizens partaking in a university course. The research contributions include a further defined concept together with a generic test process for data collection and analysis to be useful as an evaluation tool, in research as in practice. Our research design and experiences from test sessions might also work as an inspiration to other university courses. Further more, findings from our test sessions can be used as a point of departure in formulating guidelines in a handbook to improve communicability in public e-Services.

This paper elaborates on the potential to design and conduct process-oriented user tests on public e-Services. The purpose is to use key constructs of business process orientation (BPO) to develop a basis for design and communicating the value of user tests in a public e-Service context. Our hypotheses are that user tests can provide valuable results for all actors involved in e-Service development, not only in terms of how to conduct user tests per se, but also to provide incentives for a customer driven focus and highlighting the value derived from user tests. In the municipality case, actors and stakeholders are involved municipalities in an inter-organisational collaboration on e-Service development, i.e. different municipalities, locally and regionally, as well as the supplier. Citizens partaking in a university course conduct the user tests with the eye tracking technology. In total 71 users performed in test sessions on 11 different e-Services in a standard platform provided by one supplier. In this paper, we elaborate on a BPO test design based on basic constructs in the approach compared with findings from reconstructing the test process design used with an implicit approach 2012 and an explicit BPO approach in 2013. Contributions include a generic test-process design for data collection, analysis and delivery to stakeholders in an overall e-Service development. Furthermore, findings from our test sessions and test process design will inspire and guide other universities to collaborate with practitioners. Beside the strength with a real case for the students, user test sessions in collaboration can be an eye-opener to not only for municipalities but also suppliers. Thus, the potential for impacts from test results to be applied in the further development of e-Services has thereby increased.

Usability studies are conducted as a part of the usability engineering process, ensuring the usability of a developing product. Such usability studies can be conducted in a usability laboratory, or at the anticipated context of use. At the School of Computing & Informatics Technology (CIT) at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, plans for usability facilities are being evolved.This study maps what facilities are beneficial for CIT at Makerere University to adapt in order to fulfil the potential stakeholders’ needs, as well as enabling the stakeholders to conduct wanted usability studies. Furthermore, the study presents various usability engineering methods, to be compared with the needs of the stakeholders.26 potential stakeholders of the usability facilities answered two different surveys. The result shows that the stakeholders’ conceptions about usability studies in some cases are misconceptions, why educational activities about usability and usability studies should be planned alongside the development of the facilities. Further the study shows that the facilities must support usability studies conducted in field as well as studies conducted in a controlled laboratory environment. Moreover, the facilities need to provide facilities for testing mobile services, web applications, user interfaces, and provide for stress and load testing.