Involving young girls in product concept design

  • Authors:
  • Minna Isomursu;Pekka Isomursu;Kaisa Still

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Oulu, Finland;University of Oulu, Finland;University of Oulu, Finland

  • Venue:
  • CUU '03 Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Universal usability
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Young girls are a user group often neglected in the design of technical devices. In this paper, we describe a method for involving pre-teen and teen girls in a concept design process. With this target group we have experienced serious challenges in applying traditional participatory design methods, such as observations or interviews. As a solution, we have adopted a web-based storytelling environment where our target group is encouraged to create usage scenarios of a mobile terminal that would support their activities in a virtual community. Our results show that this approach is a very natural and fruitful method for involving this target group.