Browsing by Author "Lindgaard, Gitte"

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    Interactional identity: designers and developers making joint work meaningful and effective
    (ACM, 2012) Brown, Judith M.; Lindgaard, Gitte; Biddle, Robert
    We studied collaborating interface designers and software developers engaged in multidisciplinary software creation work. Twenty-one designers and developers in 8 organizations were interviewed to understand how each specialist viewed team interactions. We also shadowed most participants as they worked on novel software projects with user interface design challenges. A grounded theory analysis of interview transcripts showed that designers and developers construct unique identities in the process of collaborating that provide meaning to their artefact-mediated interactions, and that help them to effectively accomplish the work of creating novel software. Our model of interactional identities specifies a number of aspects of joint project work in which an interactional identity is expressed. We suggest these identities are constructed to bridge a gap between how designers and developers were taught to enact their roles and the demands of project-specific work.
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    Joint implicit alignment work of interaction designers and software developers
    (ACM, 2012) Brown, Judith M.; Lindgaard, Gitte; Biddle, Robert
    Collaboration is an important aspect of software creation work. In field studies of 8 teams in the early stages of novel project work at 8 organizations we focused on understanding collaborative work from the perspective of both the interaction designer and the developer. We found designer-developer collaborations, often occurring in the context of team collaborations, were extensive. While some collaborations were directed towards explicit alignment work, such as prioritizing tasks, we have studied implicit alignment work, which constitutes a larger part of the overall alignment work. The form of this work varied in some respects, but in general designer-developer interactions directed towards implicit alignment were remarkably similar. Our model shows how implicit alignment work is jointly achieved; we derived it from an extensive analysis of videos of 13 collaborative events, and verified it with our observation notes and interviews. The model is applicable to a wide variety of software creation settings, including agile and non-agile teams. Our analysis shows the implications of our observations of implicit alignment work, and we conclude organizations should take practical steps to support it, as is frequently done for explicit alignment work.