Designing Collaborative Systems : A Practical Guide to Ethnography

This is currently the only book that gives designers practical advice on how to use the important new ethnographic approach to the development of collaborative and interactive computer systems. It demonstrates how to analyse the work tasks for which the system will be used, and then shows the designer how to incorporate this information into the design process so that the resulting system will be as well-suited to the task and user-friendly as possible. Although this approach is being widely used (by, amongst others, corporations such as IBM, Microsoft and Xerox), there are currently no books which provide a practical users guide of this type. The book can also be used by students on advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses covering Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Information Systems Design.