Designing with dialogue charts: a qualitative content analysis of end‐user designers' experiences with a software engineering design tool
Authors: Calloway, L J.; Ariav, G.
Journal: Information Systems Journal (1995)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2575.1995.tb00092.x
<jats:p><jats:bold>Abstract. </jats:bold> Software engineering tools used by designers are critical to most systems development methodologies, and successful methodologies are critical to improved productivity. However, the way in which designers use and relate to software engineering tools, whether computer assisted or not, has received little attention in the design literature. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into how people perceive the process of using design tools. The study is a qualitative analysis of interview 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 developed by sophisticated end‐users. The research reported here is an exploratory study aimed at understanding how designers use one of these tools, the dialogue charts. The broad range of purposes included the uses predicted by the reference literature on design. However, the end‐user designers also used the tool opportunistically — they found a broader range of tool usage than the literature on design tools predicted. For example, they consistently used t…