Presenting ethnography in the requirements process

Abstract

We argue that the industrial development of interactive systems has to recognise the social dimension of work if these systems are to fully meet the real needs of their users. Under current approaches this depends on whether an individual requirements engineer implicitly applies a user centred approach, recognises the importance of cooperation and is sufficiently sympathetic and intuitive to understand the work and reflect this in the system requirements. We wish to move beyond this by allowing for the provision of a more systematic incorporation of the social dimensions of work. To this end we focus on developing a novel approach to the presentation of ethnographic material. Our approach is based on the use of number of viewpoints and is embodied within a general hypertext tool.