Critical Success Factors for Establishing Online User Participation in System Design: An Evaluation in Healthcare

摘要

Recent web-based technologies such as social media offer new ways for involving users in system design. However, little is known about the concrete benefits and limitations of online user participation and how to organize such processes in a corporate context. This research reports on an approach that integrated an online-platform with face-to-face activities to design an ICT-based health care service together with health care staff. A qualitative, formative evaluation of the approach over two years revealed critical success factors for applying online participation within a participatory design process. The authors show how task-related, media-related and organizational characteristics, transaction costs of participating and the need for a shared context work as preconditions and drivers for online participation. The evaluation also revealed that the online platform and scenario workshops complement each other well by integrating online user-generated content with detailed context information derived from face-to-face interaction.