Involving young girls in product concept design

Abstract

Young girls are a user group often neglected in the design of technical devices. In this paper, we describe a method for involving pre-teen and teen girls in a concept design process. With this target group we have experienced serious challenges in applying traditional participatory design methods, such as observations or interviews. As a solution, we have adopted a web-based storytelling environment where our target group is encouraged to create usage scenarios of a mobile terminal that would support their activities in a virtual community. Our results show that this approach is a very natural and fruitful method for involving this target group.