Improving the Efficiency of Design Protocol Analysis: An Approach to Speed Up the Coding Stage

This paper aims at checking the capabilities of tools to support coding activities for protocol design analysis to improve the efficiency of the process. The application of existing coding schemes to different protocols from real collaborative design sessions allows showing that the approach and the proposed tools can be flexibly adopted for various type of design tasks (product interface design and packaging design). The experiments to check the effectiveness of the proposed tools involved non-expert coders to create challenging experimental conditions and explore. This also allows exploring the viability of approaching the coding stage by non-expert coders in design protocol analysis, with a double goal: the positive results obtained show that is possible to release experts from time-demanding and HR consuming activities and, at the same time, obtain multiple parallel coded protocols for more reliable analysis. The outcomes are also discussed in terms of the implications on the development of similar supporting tools.