Participatory Whiteboarding

The Toolset

Here are the final prototypes for our whiteboarding toolset imagined in the context of Miro. You can view an interactive version here.

Timeline

This project largely followed a standard double diamond design process with a more lean UX cadence during the ideation phase.

Research

Because our problem space was more speculative than reactive—that is, our goal was to imagine new approaches to participatory design, not directly address some specific point of failure—we conducted a mixed-method research approach designed to both identify the challenges of participatory design and collect novel approaches to participatory design that we could bring into our ideation.

We gathered a whole heap of insights, so I'll only share a few from each method to show what kind of results we were getting.

🗺️ Participatory Design Journey

While we had individually organized all of our data, we wanted to summarize together as much of it as possible so we could most effectively contrast individual insights and identify where we could best intervene. To do so we constructed a large journey map, which I’ve summarized here, to identify where the most fertile soil was for a design intervention

Given the prevalence of problems throughout the design research journey we knew we would have to focus in on a smaller chunk, or else we'd spread ourselves too thin.

All of these phases had good enough evidence to support design work, but we ultimately chose the facilitation phase because it seemed to have the most pressing pain points and most opportunities for intervention; however, we wouldn't be strict if our ideas spilled into preparation or synthesis stages.

🗂️ Design Requirements

With our focus chosen, we generated design requirements to guide our idea generation.

Ideation

At this stage, we focused on generating as many ideas as possible based on user needs and design requirements. First, we timed ourselves to generate ideas on our own. Then we swapped our “idea cards” and built on top of each other’s ideas.

While going through all of the initial ideas, we found that there were some recurring themes, so we grouped the ideas that could fit well together into broader categories, identified key features that would best address user needs, and consolidated them into six design concepts.

✏️ Sketching & Feedback N=3

With our 6 ideas, we sketched them out and gave them brief descriptions. We then recruited two peers from the HCI program and scheduled 45min feedback sessions where we asked them to identify positives, negatives, and opportunities with each idea.

📦 Concept Reconfiguration

The results of these sessions showed that no singular idea was perfect, and we ended up using the feedback from this method to take apart each idea and repackage certain features as a more limited toolset.

Evaluation

After a month of prototyping with users, we took 2 more weeks to re-review feedback and prepare "final" prototypes that could be evaluated by our peers.

📋 Task-based Usability Evaluation N=5

To evaluate overall usability we conducted task-based assessments for each of our features, using a think-aloud protocol, with five of our peers in the MS-HCI program. We also included in our evaluations an A/B test for our layers feature to assess visual design variations for communicating note privacy and layer position.

We organized the results in Figjam according to feature and flow, and rated notes according to severity from 0-4. Severity ratings were assigned by team members and determined based on considerations such as the centrality of an identified problem to the overall functionality of the system, how many users identified a given problem, and the feasibility of solving the problem.

Overall impressions were positive, with participants expressing enthusiasm towards the ideas, but of course, there were still issues that needed addressing. In the interest of brevity, I'll just describe some of the more severe problems we identified in Evidence Collection. Here you you can see that users had problems identifying icons at a glance and several participants noted readability issues with our text.

💌 Responding to Feedback

We had some time before our final presentation, so we decided to respond to some of the feedback we received. We couldn't get to everything, but using our results, we triaged the more pernicious issues and a few lower priority "quick wins."

These changes can be seen in the demo videos and interactive prototype here.

Conclusion

📏 Limitations

My greatest regret and likely the biggest limitation in this project is that we never constructed a fully functional prototype that we could test in a more realistic setting. While our prototype robustly captures the UI flow of each concept and adequately demonstrates what our toolset does, it doesn’t let us evaluate how it actually changes the process of a participatory design session and indeed if it does improve anything.

We may have received positive feedback about the concepts and even had participants imagining concrete situations where the features would be helpful, but these data aren’t full confirmation.

🚀 Future Directions

I believe that there's much more work to be done here. My dream for the future participatory design is one where the barriers between UX professionals and the users they're trying to help are as low as possible.

Much like a physical room where design and design research occur, these digital tools are providing designers with a means of collaborating in a shared space, of bringing end-users into participatory design practices, of housing various design artifacts in a single, persisting place. As work increasingly becomes physically disbursed and remote, these tools allow design work to occur across greater distances.

They also improve the access of end-users to design spaces by removing physical barriers and making participation more convenient. I view this “design room” metaphor for whiteboarding tools as being rich in design opportunities for expanding the functionality of these spaces.