Making Use of Scenarios for Achieving Effective Use in Community Computing Contexts

The concept of effective use is gaining currency as a way of thinking about usability in community informatics. Broadly defined, effective use is the opportunity and capacity of a community group to leverage information communications technologies (ICTs) in order to achieve their goals. Although effective use is a worthy goal, a process for achieving effective use is not clearly defined. This paper combines the concept of scenarios from human-computer interaction (HCI) and participatory design (PD) in order to identify a design process to enhance participation and technological decision making in community information systems design projects. Our process for achieving effective use focuses first on the efficacy of scenarios as a tool to encourage and support participatory design, and second as an anchoring and adjustment heuristic. This study concludes with future research on effective use in community informatics.