Creating requirements specifications is one of the most challenging tasks in the systems development. For a complete specification, different kinds of information are gathered. This includes information about the domain and context specific technical issues, and about multifaceted cultural, political, communicational, motivational, and personal issues. As there is no information systems development (ISD) method that would yield such information comprehensively, it could be achieved by user-oriented approaches, for instance by participatory design (PD). Reciprocally, unfortunately those do not provide detailed instructions for the systems development. In this paper, we will present our experiences from two research projects where user participation was emphasised in the ISD process. We argue that a multi-methodological ISD approach that utilises prototyping and a set of different communication means for gathering and elucidating requirements in a workplace would produce better systems from the end-users point of view. Further, these experiences can be used when developing a formalised user-oriented ISD method.
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