Using Design Thinking to Break Social Barriers: an Experience Report
with Former Inmates
Abstract
Context/motivation: Design Thinking techniques have been widely
used in software requirements elicitation to understand the necessities
of stakeholders and end-users. However, there is a lack of evidence of
their effectiveness when applied to vulnerable populations.
Question/problem: What are the implications of using Design
Thinking techniques to elicit requirements in a community of former
inmates - and what would be the benefits of and challenges in this
deployment? Principal ideas/results: In this paper, we report our
experience of using Design Thinking for Requirements Elicitation of a
mobile application, customized for the former inmates of the Brazilian
Prison System and their families. Research methods: We applied
techniques such as Brainstorming, Stakeholder Mapping, Personas
Creation, Rapid Ethnography, and Interviews to obtain relevant data and
create several prototypes. Contribution: These techniques
contribute to the development of an uncommon application that aims to
help the reintegration process of former inmates into society. Our
results validate the initial hypothesis that such techniques, when
applied to a sensitive context, assist product development that meets
the end-users needs by creating a higher-quality product.
Limitations: The main limitation of the research was the lack of
access to low-literacy end-users and former inmates without previous
experience using mobile devices.