Achieving cooperative system design: Shifting from a product to a process focus

In the first decades of computer system development, most users of computer systems were engineers and programmers, so “user participation” in development was not actively sought-the developers themselves were good user representatives. In the past 15 years this has changed substantially, as computer use has spread to work environments very unlike the engineering environment (Grudin, 1990). The new divisions of responsibility and the divergence of qualifications have widened the gulf between the developer and user environments. This gulf must be bridged and the most direct approach for doing so is to increase user involvement in development.