PICTIOL: A case study in participatory design

Participatory design is an essential element of the skill set of professional interface developers and therefore is a significant component of HCI courses at universities. The PICTIVE technique is a 'low-fidelity' collaborative design technique that encourages participatory design. Significant challenges arise when attempting to introduce participatory design techniques such as PICTIVE to students who may not be studying on campus.This paper is a case-study in the design, evolution and refinement of an educational software tool designed to provide off-campus students with experience in collaborative user-centred software design.This paper investigates the origins and value of participatory design and its implementation using the PICTIVE technique. The paper describes the process of creating PICTIOL, a web-delivered solution to provide experience in problem-based learning, emulating the PICTIVE technique. Stages in development of the new software are described, including various HCI testing techniques and the iterative design/implementation/feedback loop. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential of the PICTIOL in education and industry.Whilst the focus of the project was on the development of the PICTIOL tool, the very process of creating PICTIOL is itself an example of collaborative user-centred software design.