Designing for the Don't Cares: A story about a sociotechnical system

TL;DR

This paper explores the challenges in designing a large-scale digital learning environment for Scottish schools, highlighting user engagement issues and governance problems, and proposing user stories and layered architecture as solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a sociotechnical approach emphasizing user stories and layered architecture to address complex design challenges in large educational systems.

Findings

User engagement was low among potential system users.

System governance posed significant challenges.

User stories helped clarify system requirements.

Abstract

This article discusses the difficulties that arose when attempting to specify and design a large scale digital learning environment for Scottish schools. This had a potential user base of about 1 million users and was intended to replace an existing, under-used system. We found that the potential system users were not interested in engaging with the project and that there were immense problems with system governance. The only technique that we found to be useful were user stories, presenting scenarios of how the system might be used by students and their teachers. The designed architecture was based around a layered set of replaceable services.