Travail de fin d'études / Projet de fin d'études : Feedback reviews in user-centered design - Impact of the reviewer's profile and explorations in pedagogical environments

Abstract

User-centered design is widely promoted in industry and education since it was repeatedly proven successful in designing effective and sensitive products. However, students rarely meet the end-users in educational contexts such as design studios. Instructors are then the only resource that can provide them with an end-user perspective. This thesis studies the introduction of an end-user in the user-centered design process of novice designers. More specifically, this research explores how the feedback of an end-user and an instructor compares and how it influences the designers, their design process, and their design. The methodology is based on an experiment where eleven teams of two students designed a product during a ninety-minute online exercise. Midway through their process, a feedback session with a reviewer was organized. Half the teams met an ambassador end-user as a reviewer, while the other half met an instructor. The transcripts of the recordings and the students’ final products were analyzed through different lenses in an explorative way to extract insight into the differences between the two feedback reviews and their impact. The main results depict a convergent end-user concerned with functional details and a divergent instructor keen to make the students reflect on their choices. After their review, the teams converged or diverged accordingly to their reviewer’s mindset. Then, the end-user’s feedback comments were quickly addressed by the teams but had less impact than the instructor’s comments. For pedagogical environments, these conclusions suggest that the value of reviews depends on whether their timing and their convergent/divergent aspect are consistent with the design process. Divergent feedback comments coming too late could be ignored by the designers, and early convergent feedback could mislead or restrict novice designers’ creativity.