Full paper.
To create useful and usable products, designers should hear end-users’ voices. Participatory Design (PD) activities are aimed at making user voices heard by actively including end-users in the design process. Traditional paper- and prop-based PD methods have shortcomings, especially when it comes to a distributed project and evaluation setting. To address them there exist several software solutions to support the gathering of user ideas, for example PDotCapturer. However, software support for the task of analysing the gathered data, which becomes necessary in a ‘fast and furious’ PD setting, is lacking. To address this issue we have been motivated to create an online tool for designers called PDotAnalyser. This tool was evaluated in three studies involving novice and expert designers. The results show that PDotAnalyser is a good addition to the toolbox of designers, who, nevertheless, would benefit from more support given by additional automation.