Beyond one-system thinking exploring design methods for understanding the digital work environment

Modern IT systems often fail to adequately support users’ everyday work, negatively affecting both performance and well-being. A key reason is that system development typically focuses on one system rather than considering how users interact with multiple systems at work. This paper argues that digitalisation efforts must move beyond traditional, system-bounded design to explicitly address the whole digital work environment. This synthesis study examines three design methods aimed at improving understanding of digital work environments: Contextual Personas and Contextual Think-Aloud, applied in student software projects, and the Vision Seminars method, used in a large-scale, realistic software project. All three methods seek to help IT professionals gain deeper insights into how users work across multiple systems. A qualitative meta-analysis study of six empirical studies is conducted, assessing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of each design method. The findings indicate that the design methods support a better understanding of users’ digital work environments, incorporating not only technical aspects but also well-being and psychological and social dimensions. Identified weaknesses involve risks of stereotyping, challenges for some users during evaluation, and high resource demands. Overall, the paper concludes that designing systems aligned with real digital work environments is both necessary and achievable.