DESIGNING WITH DIALOGUE CHARTS - A QUALITATIVE CONTENT-ANALYSIS OF END-USER DESIGNERS EXPERIENCES WITH A SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DESIGN TOOL

Software engineering tools used by designers are critical to most syst ems development methodologies, and successful methodologies are critic al to improved productivity. However, the way in which designers use a nd relate to software engineering tools, whether computer assisted or not, has received little attention in the design literature. The purpo se of this study is to gain insight into how people perceive the proce ss of using design tools. The study is a qualitative analysis of inter view 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 develo ped by sophisticated end-users. The research reported here is an explo ratory study aimed at understanding how designers use one of these too ls, the dialogue charts. The broad range of purposes included the uses predicted by the reference literature on design. However, the end-use r designers also used the tool opportunistically - they found a broade r range of tool usage than the literature on design tools predicted. F or example, they consistently used the tool as a communications vehicl e among different phases of design and development. The results show t hat the relationships these 'end-user designers' developed with the ta rget 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 sem istructured interview with a hidden agenda for gathering data. The dat a analysis techniques draw on the concepts of discovering grounded the ory as described by Glaser and Strauss. They further draw on the conce pts of qualitative content analysis synthesized by Krippendorff and th e qualitative data analysis methods described by Miles and Huberman.