Group-Based Expert Walkthroughs to Compensate for Limited Access to Target User Groups as in Case of Chronically Ill Patients

Involvement of real end users right from the beginning of an IT project is understood nowadays as good practice particularly in research projects where new and innovative concepts are to be investigated. In some situations, this is not feasible though, because this would cause unreasonable burden on target users, e.g., in case of chronically ill older patients or it is simply not possible, because administrative hurdles like permission by ethical committees need to be overcome, therefore it is necessary to install substituting methods. In the PICASO project (Personalised Integrated Care Approach for Service Organisations and Care Models for Patients with Multi-Morbidity and Chronic Conditions) this was achieved by implementing group-based expert walkthroughs where experts with different work-domain expert knowledge, in this case from usability, accessibility, clinical practice and software development, walked through an application by following typical usage scenarios target users are supposed to achieve. In contrast to the original method outcomes of walkthroughs were documented in form of software requirements, i.e. essential functionalities and features of the envisioned application instead of usability and accessibility issues. This way a reference document for developers evolved that closed the gap in bringing user requirements to application development.