Clarifying requirements for Information Technology through user involvement and prototyping – IT support for operational rescue-services

The purpose of this master thesis is to examine the possibility to clarify the user’s requirements on Information Technology (IT) by using user involvement and prototyping. User involvement as a concept is commonly accepted. Studies show the benefits of user involvement throughout the development process, although few studies describes the work process in detail. Instead they focus on analysing and discussing the results. This study will try to show how to involve users throughout the development process by describing the design process in detail, thus gaining a better understanding for the user’s requirements and needs. Since user involvement is a concept without clear definitions, that can be attained by many different means, a mix of different methods and theories were used. Partly to give a overview and partly to show pros and cons. Our conclusion is that user involvement and prototyping provide simple but effective tools, both for gathering user requirements and for design & development purposes. One should be aware that user involvement and prototyping will initially result in loss of time since the large amount of information that is gathered has to be processed and analyzed. That loss of time is however recuperated during the later stages of the developement by the fact that the system in question will be more in line with the users requirements and demands. The study was done in cooperation with the rescue services in Gothenburg, focusing on operational rescue services.Hösterminen 200