A Participatory Method for Multidimensional Analysis and Proposing Improvements in Collaborative Systems

The difficulty of evaluating collaborative systems is a historical challenge, since the multiple dimensions of collaboration are considered success factors for the system, and these factors go beyond individual interaction. Adopting the fundamentals of Participatory Design, this paper presents a multidimensional method for evaluating and proposing improvements on collaborative systems. The method involves three phases: (1) a presential briefing phase; (2) a non-presential observation phase; and (3) a Future Workshop phase. Instances of the proposed method seek to involve users as co-designers, making informed and relevant decisions about the future of a system which they could learn and use. This paper also presents the results of a preliminary evaluation, which consists in an instance of the method: evaluating and proposing improvements on a groupware prototype. The instance is compared to a traditional groupware evaluation method, exposing that the instance, not only identified similar collaboration-related issues, but also identified issues that were not identified by the inspection. During the experiment, participants informed us about issues experienced while collaborating and how they were perceived, and elicited possible futures in which the system would have more value to their objectives.