Towards a Collaborative Tool to Support User-Centered Design

A collaborative tool allows a group of users to achieve a common goal. It provides the means for communication, coordination, collaboration, and social regulation. Currently, there are collaborative tools to support the design of the software development process. These tools involve group collaboration to generate design deliverables. However, few of them focus on a user-centered design or those that do leave aside the collaborative environment that considers the social needs of the workgroup. This article proposes a collaborative tool for the making of user-centered design deliverables. We show the bases for developing the tool, considering the expert opinions. Besides, from group activity analysis, a conceptual architecture is proposed. The conceptual architecture considers an interaction layer, a functional layer, and a social layer, focusing on a collaborative environment for teamwork. In addition, we present a prototype derived from the architecture, allowing us to verify its usefulness.