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functionalities. These additional functionalities were
mostly precisions of functionalities already
anticipated and, to a lesser extent, entirely new
functionalities. These last ones were common to
several user profiles (i.e. either common to
engineers, stylists and marketers or to stylists and
marketers) or specific to a profile (in this case,
marketers and engineers). The precisions were
essentially specific to engineers and stylists.
6 CONCLUSIONS
AND PERSPECTIVES
The phase of requirements prioritization step is a
key element of the software process as it will lead to
the selection of functionalities to implement. The
results presented above, and the ensuing discussion,
allow us to make several recommendations to
promote the design of artifacts with a real added
value to the user. A first prerequisite is the
integration of end users in the prioritization phase. In
the field of collaborative engineering, previous
studies have demonstrated that multidisciplinary
design teams are beneficial to the design of products.
The results of the study related in this paper allow us
to go further by claiming that multidisciplinary
teams of users are beneficial to the design of
products which are in fact useful for them. Indeed,
users have additional needs related on their job
profile, which results in different priorities. This is
particularly interesting in a context of
“participatory” design, developed in Living Labs.
Participatory design is based on a strong
involvement of users in the expression of needs or
the imagination of solutions, and on the fact that
users must make decisions as well as designers. The
prioritization phase is essential, because it allows
future users to imagine new functionalities that were
not proposed by the designers. However, giving
users a first list of functionalities is crucial for them
to imagine the future artifact to have food for
thought. These prioritized lists are necessary for to
allow designers to consider both their own
constraints and user needs. This leads them to make
compromises that benefit the real utility of the
artifact to be designed.
Despite the originality of the results presented in
this article, a limitation of our study concerns the
small project and the small sample size. That
justifies the exploratory status of study which let to
obtain trends and not general conclusions about the
differences between stakeholders. A second limit
concerns the absence, in our data collection protocol,
of elicitation interviews following the filling of the
questionnaire. The arranging of such interviews has
not been possible because of constraints concerning
the availability of the participants.
From this limit, a research perspective is to
analyze the requirements prioritization by users
adding to our original protocol elicitation interviews
to know the reasons for assigning a priority level and
how users perform this task. This would allow to
identify finely subjective criteria justifying the levels
assigned to each functionality. For example, we
would then be able to explain why a user who gave
the level ‘unimportant’ to functionality: is it because
he imagined a very infrequent use or because he
guessed he wouldn’t need this functionality (but he
did not dare to give the level ‘useless’)? We would
also understand how each assignment was
performed. Thus, we could know if people gave
‘very important’ level first or if they began with
‘useless’ functionalities. This would show that users
know immediately what would useless or instead
that users a priori know what they would need.
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