Connect and engage IT developers with end users: The succeeding procedure

Connect and engage IT developers with end users: The succeeding procedure

Freijser, F.S.H.

Mulder, I.J. (mentor)
Silvester, S. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

Master of Science Design for Interaction

2014-11-27

This report is the result of a graduation project performed to obtain the Master degree at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft. The graduation assignment has been executed for Centric, a Dutch IT company. One of its departments develops software for local governments and water boards to raise and collect taxes and to calculate the value of properties. Centric has recognized that the end users of their software are hardly contacted and included in the development of their products. Although contact with clients is a daily routine, the end users are not part of this. This especially counts for the development teams who build new software parts. More user involvement results in more efficient software and increases its usability, which is the overall goal. In this project also the development process used by the development teams of Centric plays a crucial role. The Scrum method prescribes many elements that affect the possibilities for communication with end users. The goal of this project is therefore to develop a tool for Centric, well positioned in their development process, to let their IT developers (better) connect and engage with the end users of their solutions. Observations and interviews with development teams, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, consultants and end users were the basis of an extensive analysis of the context. It showed that the Scrum method forms a very important guideline for the design of the tool. A canvas workshop (Henze, Mulder, & Stappers, 2013) especially helped to visualize the exact moments where and what kind of communication with end users is desired and needed. Short and frequent communication fits the short and incremental Scrum method best. To truly engage with the end users it is however required that also contextual information such as the work environment of end users, their available equipment and emotions is included. The analysis also showed that there are too many end users to involve all of them in the development process at the same time. The selection of groups of end users functioning as lead users is therefore the suitable solution. As a result of the analysis a design goal and interaction vision were formulated to further define the project goal. The focus was to create an approachable, motivating and almost innate form of communication between end users and a development team, which provides input for long-term knowledge on end users shared between multiple development teams. The consecutive ideation phase resulted in pre-concepts, which were evaluated by end users and developers. Also an interaction prototype was made to test the envisioned interaction. This led to the final concept, Tessera. The proposed Tessera concept exists of three parts that relate to three sequential actions, namely communication, reflection and sharing. For the communication between development teams and lead users a mosaic panel is installed at Centric. This panel includes nine tablets with which contact with the lead users can be sought through video calls or chats. The developers can initiate a conversation whenever they have a question and because of the fast response time they are able to implement insights in the development of new software directly. To make sure the whole development team shares the insights gained in conversations the retrospective sessions, prescribed by Scrum, are used to reflect on the contact moments of the past sprint cycle. In order to make all user information available to all development teams and others of the Tax department, an interactive knowledge tree is projected on one of the walls within the department. All conversations with lead users and the insights linked to them are visualized and stored on this tree. One can watch recordings, read insights, change categorizations etc. so that all information is shared with the whole department. Eventually, in the prototype test an actual connection was made between developers at Centric and end users at client organizations. The awareness about the importance of user involvement has already grown, especially with the users and developers who participated in tests during this project. It is expected that this concept will consequently result in more engagement but this can only be confirmed after some time of use. The total final concept still has to be made into an operational version and be implemented at Centric’s Tax department. The implementation and adoption of the concept will approximately take one year.

Connect
Engage
End users
IT developers
Tool
Scrum
Centric

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d61faad3-bd9b-409a-b68e-7c27c4401c94

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2014 Freijser, F.S.H.