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Participatory development

A visual example of the workflow
Design-as-you-go workflow in 3 phases

The "Participatory development" workflow is a non-standard way of integrating workflows and human-centred research. The workflow is designed-on-the-go as the participatory development process progresses. We will make use of conditions to “stop” the workflow in order to create the follow-up tasks, and then delete the "stop" condition so that the workflow can “resume” again. We will use this strategy twice during this recipe.

Field workers start a workflow for each member of the community they interview.

In the first task they fill in the participant’s details including an email address.

In the second task the participant lists all the current challenge they experience in their daily lives.

In the third task the participant lists all the current resources they have at their disposal.

The first section of the workflow is used to gather information from the community regarding their current challenges and resources. Once information from enough participants are capture, the research team wants to “stop” the workflows so that they can extract the information, analyse it and consolidate it into themes*.

To get the workflow to “stop” before the next task (Synthesis) we have to design an unlikely condition (e.g. Firstname IS abababababa) for this task.

After the research team has analysed the information and identified the themes, they upload these themes into the Designer. The themes are included as the different options for the challenges checkboxes and the resources checkboxes.

Once this has been done, the unlikely condition that has been set before for the task “Synthesis” is deleted in the Designer. The workflows will now resume and send an email to all participants to notify them that the synthesis of the researchers is available for their evaluation.

They click on the link in the email and are taken to the “Synthesis” task. The task asks them to vote for their top three challenges and resources as presented in the lists. After completion, the workflow is “stopped” for the second time.

To achieve this we have set a second unlikely condition for task “Notify participants of results”. This was also done in the Designer when we first designed the workflow.

The research team tallies the votes and uploads the results and a message into the last task. This is again done in the Designer. Once the task is ready the unlikely condition is deleted and the last the task in activated and the email is sent to all participants.

* Human-Centered Design Kit of IDEO

This case study was modelled on the HEAR and CREATE sections as described in Human-Centered Design Kit of IDEO.

This workflow first got information from the community, then the research team analysed the information and identified themes. These themes are presented to all participants to see if they agree with the findings of the research team. In qualitative research this can be seen as a member checking strategy to improve the accuracy of the research.