Using the Mobile Application EDDY for Gathering User Information in the Requirement Analysis

The users' knowledge and requirements are important factors in the design of products. To ensure the success of products designers and developers have to get to know their target group users better. Over the years a lot of innovative user centered design studies have been written. Many researchers believe that these studies could be used by developers to help them in the process of creating new products. This paper presents a framework called EDDY that aims at facilitating the development of mobile applications for gathering various kinds of data. Such a framework and applications based on it should be helpful for the data collection during studies such as Cultural Probes and the Experience Sampling Method. These approaches involve the users as the persons who collect the required information themselves. In this paper we evaluate the advantages of EDDY for such studies. We investigated whether there is a significant advantage in using a mobile application for the documentation of a user's everyday life instead of using a classical kit.