The We!Design Methodology: Designing Educational Applications with Students

Recently, many participatory design (PD) methodologies have been successfully applied to the design of educational applications with students as participants. However, most of the proposed methodologies have exacting requirements that make their deployment quite difficult. In this paper, we propose a student-centered methodology, named We!Design, which aims at designing applications that support content-independent learning processes and that can be easily applied in real educational contexts. The methodology consists of two phases. During the first phase, a number of design sessions take place with the participation of small groups of students. Students cooperatively formulate needs and design suggestions for the educational application. In the second phase, the designers analyze the products of the first phase and synthesize them in a single application. The We!Design methodology was applied for the design of a course Web site. Twelve design sessions were conducted with the participation of 46 undergraduate students. No significant impediments were identified during the methodology´s application, and it was characterized as pleasant and interesting by the students. Furthermore, the students evaluated positively the usefulness and ease of use of the designed Web site