Keeping track of design processes is a cumbersome task due to the apparently unconstrained and unstructured nature of creative work. Traceability is fundamental to revisit and reflect on the design narratives that describe artefact evolution. In this paper, we aim to identify what characteristics are necessary to facilitate traceability of creative design processes. For this end, we use a functional prototype to connect artefacts, design rationale, and decisions in a shared workspace. We evaluated this prototype for 15 weeks with six pairs of students engaged in a user-centered design project. Our findings show that having a lean repository of artefacts annotated with design rationale can facilitate tracking progress in different phases of the process. We found that creating a record of the participants' design work is useful to reflect on and for team agreement, ensure consistency of evolving artefacts, and help in planning future steps in the design project.

Design artefacts are vital to communicate design outcomes, both in remote and co-located settings. However, it is unclear how artefacts are used to mediate interactions between designers and stakeholders of the design process. The purpose of this paper is exploring how professional design teams use artefacts to guide and capture discussions involving multidisciplinary stakeholders while they work in a co-located setting. An earlier draft of this paper was paper published in the Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE 2017). This work adds substantial clarification of the methodology followed, further details and photographs of the case studies, and an extended discussion about our findings and their relevance for designing interactive systems. We report the observations of six design meetings in three different projects, involving professional design teams that follow a user-centered design approach. Meetings with stakeholders are instrumental for design projects. However, design teams face the challenge of synthesizing large amounts of information, often in a limited time, and with minimal common ground between meeting attendees. We found that all the observed design meetings had a similar structure consisting of a series of particular phases, in which design activities were organized around artefacts. These artefacts were used as input to disseminate and gather feedback of previous design outcomes, or as output to collect and process a variety of perspectives. We discuss the challenges faced by design teams during design meetings, and propose three design directions for interactive systems to coordinate design meetings revolving around artefacts.

Design meetings with multidisciplinary stakeholders are instrumental for design projects. However, design teams face the challenges of synthetizing large amounts of information, often in a limited time, and with minimal common ground. We investigate these challenges through in-the-wild observations of six design meetings in three different projects, with professional design teams that follow a user-centered design methodology. We found that all the observed design meetings had a similar structure consisting of particular phases, in which design activities were organized around artefacts. These artefacts were used as input to disseminate and gather feedback of previous design outcomes, or as output to collect and process a variety of perspectives. From these findings, we synthetize practical guidelines to optimize artefact-based interactions during design meetings.

In the design process, designers make a wide variety of decisions that are essential to transform a design from a conceptual idea into a concrete solution. Recording and tracking design decisions, a first step to capturing the rationale of the design process, are tasks that until now are considered as cumbersome and too constraining. We used a holistic approach to design, deploy, and verify decision cards; a low threshold tool to capture, externalize, and contextualize design decisions during early stages of the design process. We evaluated the usefulness and validity of decision cards with both novice and expert designers. Our exploration results in valuable insights into how such decision cards are used, into the type of information that practitioners document as design decisions, and highlight the properties that make a recorded decision useful for supporting awareness and traceability on the design process.

Design, and in particular user-centered design processes for interactive systems, typically involve multidisciplinary teams. The different and complemen- tary perspectives of the team members enrich the design ideas and decisions, and the involvement of all team members is needed to achieve a user interface for a system that carefully considers all aspects, ranging from user needs to technical requirements. The difficulty is getting all team members involved in the early stages of design and communicating design ideas and decisions in a way that all team members can understand them and use them in an appropriate way in later stages of the process. This chapter describes the COMuICSer storyboarding technique, which presents the scenario of use of a future system in a way that is understandable for each team member, regardless of their background. Based on an observational study in which multidisciplinary teams collaboratively created storyboards during a co-located session, we present recommendations for the facilitation of co-located collaborative storyboarding sessions for multidisciplinary teams and digital tool support for this type of group work.

Current digital design tools that have a high connectivity offer a wide range of possibilities for both co-located and remote collaborative design activities. However, from the point of view of conventional collaborative design practices we identified with practitioners and design companies, these tools lack integrated and comprehensive support during the ideation phase. Consequently, we propose a reference framework with solutions for supporting collaboration among professional designers with digital tools in the early stages of design.

Design activities associated to the ideation phase of design processes require mutual understanding and clear communication based on artefacts. However, this is often a challenge for remote and multidisciplinary teams due to the lack of ad hoc tools for this purpose. Our approach is to solve these limitations by explicitly connecting pieces of information related to design rationale, feedback, and evolution with the artefacts that are subject of communication. We propose Helaba, a system that creates a shared workspace to support communication revolving around design artefacts and activities within multidisciplinary teams. Helaba supports design communication and rationale, and potentially leads to more satisfying outcomes from the design process.

Storyboarding is a technique that is often used for the conception of new interactive systems. A storyboard illustrates graphically how a system is used by its users and what a typical context of usage is. Although the informal notation of a storyboard stimulates creativity, and makes them easy to understand for everyone, it is more difficult to integrate in further steps in the engineering process. We present an approach, "Time In Storyboards" (Timisto), to extract valuable information on how various interactions with the system are positioned in time with respect to each other. Timisto does not interfere with the creative process of storyboarding, but maximizes the structured information about time that can be deduced from a storyboard.

Model-driven development of user interfaces has become increasingly powerful in recent years. Unfortunately, model-driven approaches have the inherent limitation that they cannot handle the informal nature of some of the artifacts used in truly multidisciplinary user interface development such as storyboards, sketches, scenarios and personas. In this chapter, we present an approach and tool support for multidisciplinary user interface development bridging informal and formal artifacts in the design and development process. Key features of the approach are the usage of annotated storyboards, which can be connected to other models through an underlying meta-model, and cross-toolkit design support based on an abstract user interface model.