Designing for use in a future context : five case studies in retrospect

Abstract: This thesis presents a framework - Use Oriented Service Design - for how design can be shaped by people-s future communications needs and behaviour. During the last ten years we have seen the telecom industry go through several significant changes. It has been re-regulated into much more of an open market and, as a result of this, other actors and role-holders have entered the market place and taken up the competition with traditionally monopolistic telecom players. Systems and applications are opening up in order to support interoperability. The convergence between the telecom and IT sector with respect to technology, market and business models is continuing. In this process, we have seen a continuous development which involves a change of focus: from the user interface towards the services and from users towards usage situations. The Use Oriented Service Design approach (UOSD for short) addresses this change.In UOSD three different design views are explored and analysed: the needs view, the behavioural view, and the technical R & D view.UOSD was developed with the specific aim of helping companies to meet pro-actively the requirements a future use context will place on their service offerings. Two gaps are defined and bridged: the needs gap and the product gap. The needs gap, defines a set of needs that is not met in a current context of study. Three different needs categories are addressed: needs that users easily can articulate, needs that users can articulate only by indirect means and, finally, needs users can neither foresee nor anticipate. The second gap is the product gap, it provides a measure of the enabling power of a company-s technical initiatives. Technology as it is applied, or as it readily can be applied to meet a set of defined needs, together with planned R & D initiatives will predict the company-s ability to meet a future use context.An Integrated Prototyping Environment (IPE) was defined and partly developed to support four modes of operation: collection, Analysis, design and evaluation. IPE consists of a collection & analysis module, a sketching & modelling module and a module for prototyping & simulation. It also provides an access port that supports communication with an external development environment.The thesis reflects the evolution from before the widespread introduction of the web to today-s pervasive computing and is based on work done within both research and industrial settings. In the first part of the thesis, the UOSD framework is presented together with a background and a discussion of some key concepts. Part two of the thesis includes five case studies of which the two first Represent a more traditional human factors work approach and its application in an industrial context. The three remaining studies exemplify the industrial application of UOSD as it is presented in this thesis.