Active Collaborative Learning: Supporting Software Developers in Creating Redesign Proposals

Abstract

Redesign proposals have been suggested as means to improve the feedback from usability evaluation to software development. Yet redesign proposals are usually created by usability specialists without any involvement of the software developers who will implement the proposals. This paper reports from an exploratory study where redesign proposals were created in an active and collaborative learning process that involved both software developers and usability specialists. The focus was on the support that the developers needed in order to contribute constructively to improve the usability of the system. The findings show that this process had a considerable impact on the developers’ understanding of the usability problems, especially the weaknesses of the system. They were able to contribute constructively to create redesign proposals, and they found the workshop very useful for their future efforts to eliminate the usability problems that have been identified.