improving the design of business and interactive system concepts in a digital business consultancy
Often, the multidisciplinary design of business and interactive system concepts is not particularly collaborative nor nearly as "user-centered" as the organization doing the design claims. This paper describes efforts at changing that within a high speed and low resource environment by involving all disciplines in early user research and in the synthesis of the findings and their application to design activities. The focus is on two high-profile design projects, one involving personal media management and the other involving organizational knowledge management. We describe what we did and why, and how well what we did worked, with particular attention to the affects of organizational culture and politics on success.
organizational culture process improvement business concept design interactive system concept design rapid ethnography multidisciplinary collaboration user-centered design