This document discusses using an apprenticeship model to improve the relationship between designers and customers during requirements gathering. It describes how designers can adopt the role of apprentice by observing customers perform their work in order to understand the details, structure, and history of the work. This allows customers to impart deep knowledge about their work context. The document also discusses how the relationship evolves so designers can articulate their understanding, suggest improvements, and work with the customer as a partner in the design process.

2. Objectives
 Introduction
 Requirements gathering
 The Designer as Apprentice
 Building on Apprenticeship
 Apprenticeship in Practice
 Partnership in Design

3. Introduction
 System design is so intimately involved with how
people work, designers need better approaches to
gathering customer requirements.
 It is the relationship between designers and customers
that determines how well the design team understands
the customer problem.
 The current interest in participatory design,
ethnographic techniques, and field research
techniques grows out of the recognition that
traditional interviewing and surveying techniques are
not adequate for designing today’s applications.

4. Requirement gathering
 If we build a product for sale that meets few customer
needs, we will not be competitive in the marketplace.
 Designing from deep knowledge of the customer is
central to any effective requirements definition
process, and companies are introducing customer-
centered approaches in an effort to chart a clear path
from customer to deliverable.

5. Issues of requirement engineering
 Requirements definition conversations often centre
around steps to do, techniques to use, or methods to
follow.
 Certainly without a clearly defined goal, we would not
know how to proceed.
 All aspects of requirements definition ultimately
succeed or fail based on how well people can work
together.

6. Human communication
 Requirement definition is about people talking effectively
with one another.
 First, customers and designers must develop a shared
understanding of the work problems and the impact of
technical solutions on the work.
 Team members who did not talk to the customer need to
understand what was learned, draw their own conclusions
and effectively participate in team conversations.
 Finally, organizational functions—design, engineering,
marketing, documentation, testing, and customers—must
also understand the problem, agree to the technical
solution, and communicate implications for their own
functions.

7. Involvement and Control
 Effective requirements definition requires involvement
and mutual control of the process by all players.
 No one likes to feel out of control of their time, their
work activities, or their goals.
 Ownership means having the power and skill to
renovate any given process to meet the unique needs
of a particular team

8. Change is a Necessary Ingredient
 we must redefine jobs to include designers who don’t
code, work practitioners who might not design, and
architects who make the platform fit the work not the
work fit the platform.
 we have to change the places we work: at customer
sites as they do real work.
 It is the relationship between designers and customers
that determines how well the design team understands
the customer problem.
 A familiar model of relationship suggests roles,
attitudes, and behaviours people use naturally.

9. The Designer as Apprentice
 How do designers learn enough about customers’ work
to design well?
 What kind of relationship allows customers to impart
deep knowledge about their work?
 The relationship between master and apprentice
stands out as a useful model.
 Just as an apprentice learns a skill from a master,
designers want to learn about their customers’ work
from the customer.

10. Seeing the work reveals what
matters
 Even if the master is a good teacher, apprenticeship in
the context of ongoing work is the most effective way
to learn.
 People are not aware of everything they do, Each step
of doing a task reminds them of the next step.
 Some actions are the result of years of experience and
have subtle reasons;
 Customers are also not aware of everything they do or
why they do it.

11. Seeing the work reveals details
 Talking about work while doing it allows a master
craftsperson to reveal all the details of a craft.
 As master or apprentice observes a pattern or
principle in action, he or she can point it out
immediately.
 the master can describe exactly what he or she is doing
and why
 Every action customers take and every object around
them helps them talk about what they are doing in
detail.

12. Seeing the work reveals structure
 The apprentice learns the strategies and techniques of
work by observing multiple instances of a task and
forming his or her own understanding of how to do it.
 The master can communicate techniques and
strategies without articulating them.
 Designers observing multiple events and multiple
customers learn to see the common strategies
underlying the work.
 Once they understand the basic strategies, they can
start to imagine a system that would support those
strategies.

13. The apprentice can learn from the
master’s experience
 Apprentices learn from the experience gained by a
master before their apprenticeships started.
 Designers can learn about events that occurred in the
past.
 The artefacts of work papers, forms, notes, clipboards,
and so forth trigger conversations about how they were
used, how they were created, and how their structure
supported their use in a particular instance.
 The documentation provided the context She/he
needed to recover a detailed story.

14. Building on Apprenticeship
 While apprenticeship defines an attitude for designers
to adopt.
 apprentices want to know how to do the work,
designers must determine what a system might do to
support the work. This leads to changes in the
customer-designer relationship.

15. The designer must be responsible
for seeing work structure
 Designer must understand structure and
implementation
 The job of the designer is to recognize work structure.

16. Designers must articulate their
understanding
 Apprentices can learn the structure of work without
articulating it. But if designers do not articulate the
structure they see to their customers, they cannot get
their understanding corrected.
 Which of these designs is best? It depends on which
interpretation is correct. The only way to ensure an
interpretation is correct is by sharing it with the
customer.
 We fail in the entire purpose of working with
customers if we do not share and validate these
interpretations.

17. The designer’s job is to improve
work
 The designer constantly thinks about ways to improve
the work with technology.
 Designers know about technology, have skill in
applying it to real-life problems, and naturally respond
to the customer’s activities by designing improvements
to them.
 The apprenticeship model allows both designer and
customer to introduce design ideas as the work
suggests them.
 The customer can respond to the idea while doing the
work the idea supports.

18. The designer has a specific focus
 The designer, who intends to support a specific kind of
work, needs to guide the customer in talking about
this specific part of that work.
 The apprenticeship model allows designer and
customer to guide the conversation into areas of work
that are relevant to the design.
 Using the apprenticeship model as a base, designer
and customer can develop an interaction that allows
them to explore and understand the customer’s work
together.

19. Apprenticeship In Practice
 In practice at some point the designer makes an
observation or asks a question. This interrupts the
flow of work.
 In order to respond, the customer has to stop working,
step back, and think about the question.
 Maintaining the apprentice relationship requires
attention to the interaction. Otherwise, customer and
designer may fall back into more traditional patterns
for requirements gathering.

20. Falling into other relationship
models
 Having apprenticeship as a model gives designers a
way of behaving that replaces the behaviours they
would naturally use otherwise. But because other
relationship models exist, and are habitual, designers
must recognize when they have fallen into them and
know how to get out.

21. Talking in the abstract
 People are liable to giving a high-level summary of past
events devoid of the detail we need.
 Most people will start telling a story in the middle,
ignoring what went before. Then they will skip whole
steps as they tell the story.
 Listen for missing steps and ask the customer repeat
comments as necessary.

22. Tuning an interpretation
 Customers responding to the interpretation in the
moment of doing the work can fine-tune it quite
precisely.
 A design is based on interpretations of work; if these
are not shared with the customer, the design will
reflect the designer’s made-up explanations of
customers behaviour.

23. Adjusting Focus
 Focus guides the interaction with the customer,
determining what to pay attention to and what to
ignore.
 The designer’s initial focus may be wrong or too
limited.
 Probe into the details. Why is this information so
different? What is going on? What expectations are
violated? Probing leads to an expanded understanding
of the work.

24. Partnership In Design
 We started with the notion of apprenticeship as a good way
to learn about the customer. But applying apprenticeship to
the special problems of design leads to a shared design
conversation and a partnership between customer and
designer.
 Apprenticeship is a form of intense listening that leads to
mutual ownership and partnership between customers and
designers.
 Using the apprenticeship model addresses the problem of
requirements definition by creating an effective
relationship between designers and customers.

25. References
 HUGH R. BEYER and KAREN HOLTZBLATT
Apprenticing with the customer. Communication of
ACM may 1995/vol.38 No 5
 Holtzblatt, K. If we’re a team, why don’t we act like
one? Interactions 1, 3 (July 1994), 17.
 Holtzblatt K., and Beyer, H. Making customer centered
design work for teams. Commun. ACM 36, 10 (Oct.
1993), 92–103.