Apprenticing with the customer
Hugh R. Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt · Communications of the ACM · 1995
A new computer system changes how its customers work.Designing such a system requires intimate knowledge of customers' work and motives to ensure that the system supports them well.The creation of a new system implicitly means designing the new work practice it will support.Because system design is so intimately involved with how people work, designers need better approaches to gathering customer requirements.1 The current interest in participatory design, ethnographic techniques, and field research techniques grows out of the recognition that traditional interviewing and surveying techniques are not adequate for designing today's applications.These new approaches seek to improve requirements definition by creating new relationships between designers and customers [11].It is the relationship between designers and customers that determines how well the design team understands the customer problem.This includes not only the overall relationship between design team and customer community, but the individual, minute-by-minute process by which a single designer works with a single customer to understand the customer's work.It is by understanding each person in the context of that person's work that the team comes to understand the whole work problem [5,13].Through face-to-face interaction, customers and designers define