Supporting Design Communication with Explicit Representation of Evaluation Feedback

Usability is an important characteristic for information systems intended to support their users. In order to achieve usability, an iterative change of focus between design and formative evaluation during development is an often recommended approach. Our experience from industrial projects is, however, that communication problems and misinterpretations often occur during this change of focus. It is not sufficient that the evaluation reports give feedback—they must also support the redesign work. One promising attempt to achieve such evaluation reports would be to use Design Space Analysis, which is an approach to design rationale representation. In this paper, we take an excerpt from a real-life evaluation report from one of our industrial projects, and show the implications of using a more structured approach to make the arguments in the evaluation report more explicit.