The HANDS website - for spreading the ideas

At the Persuasive 08 Conference I had several talks with Kristian Tønnesen. Due to the fact, that the userrequirements not are easily identified, it would be highly valuable not consider the analysis of userrequirements as a project private activity, but let other relevant and qualified people get access to parts of the HANDS website. This posting is about how to do so.

Kristian Tønnesen is a very bright guy from Copenhagen with a good sense of humour. Kristian is writing an industrial phd for Danfoss, which is a huge danish(but very international) coorporation(probably 20.000 employee). For Danfoss innovation and design is a very important competitive factor. Due to that fact, supporting collaboration between salespersons, engineers, designers and ? is very important. Most of it can only take place through CSCW-tools(Computer Supported Collaborative Work). Kristian is writing about design and use of CSCW-tools. I asked him about advice for the designers and users of the HANDS CSCWtool(the present adress: hands.hum.aau.dk).

In a 10 minute conversation he gave several real good instructions.
I told him, that the HANDS CSCWtool should have three categories of users: a)general public, b) the partners of the consortium and c) interested and qualified individuals(parents, teachers, psychologists, researchers, ...).
The first category is easily supported.
The second category do have a core group of usecases, orientated around the work(making deliverables, getting overview of a WP, accesing templates. You could label them "Management & administration". All important usecases, but wellknown or easily identifiable. Another group of usecases would Kristian Tønnesen label "innovation and design". Such usescases is presentation of demos, discussion about demos or ideas, links to interesting articles and more.
The third category is interested and qualified individuals, which have no responsibility for the working proces. They are interesting for the HANDS project as technology early adopters. We(the HANDS project needs them because userrequirements is indeed very different. Valuable functionalities for this category is demodownloads, oppurtunity to comment on ideas and comment on comment, give links and possibly participate in open HANDS activities in Aalborg, Budapest and elsewhere.

He gave a number of good advices

1. We will manage category a and the usescase for c labeled "Management & administration". It is not a problem. "Innovation and design" usescases are the challenge.
2. There is no set of rules, which leads to a succesfull CSCW-tool supporting "Innovation and design" usescases. Usescases that is being uses.
3. Email is the alternative. Users would prefer to stick to this media, because they are familar with it and it is private.
4. Discussionsgroups, that work in the manner like Googlegroups, where users can receive postings from their forums in their mailbox and are able to reply in the mailclient to, are attractive.
5. User feel it is tirring to go to CSCW tools, where you can communicate with others - somewhere.
6. Activating the users are a important issue. They are not active by default.
7. Users are very annoyed when they experience functionalities that are not accesible to them. They give up searching for the functionalities, they need.