Of Models, Rationales and Prototypes: Studying Designer Needs in an Airborne Maritime Surveillance Drawing Tool to Support Audio Communication

In this work, we seek to understand the needs of interaction designers involved in industrial system engineering processes. While current research offers a set of methods and tools for them, we believe that more empirical user studies focusing on designers are needed, in particular to support how model-based activity analysis may inform their decisions. Our designers’ need analysis is conducted through participatory design and contextual inquiry, and applied through a real use-case project: a distributed tactile tool for airborne maritime surveillance. Thanks to this study, we report on our insights on the usability problems and needs related in particular to scenario-based modeling, model-based design rationales and design-based model refinement.