Designing from inside: steps in the evolution of a collaborative system

Users’ participation in the design process may change the overall goals of the design. Also, the context in which a prototype is tested might play a critical role in the design process. This paper presents how the contexts of use and a dialogue among users and designers shaped the DHS system. The DHS is a Web-based system that allows users to attach a commentary to certain Web documents. This system was used in a pilot study and two longitudinal case studies, defining a discussion context and an annotation context. Through a text-based commenting dialogue, users contributed ideas for the design and helped repair errors. The dialogue space also supported designers’ own communication by making new ideas and prototypes explicit. The experiences from the development of DHS have given valuable insights on how to achieve lightweight participatory design of collaborative systems.