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Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 494–506

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Collaboration in web design: Sharing knowledge,

pursuing usability
Francesca Alby *, Cristina Zucchermaglio
Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’,
via dei Marsi 78, 00185 Rome, Italy
Received 2 May 2004; received in revised form 21 August 2007; accepted 29 October 2007

Abstract
This article analyzes how and why collaboration is useful in web design. Through an analysis of
interactions in an Italian Internet company, the article shows that collaboration is the system used by
designers to improve organizational functioning and the quality of products. In particular, it shows that
collaboration supports certain crucial work activities, such as the planning of new products and the pursuit of
interface usability. To perform these activities, designers draw on specific interactive resources, such as a
repertoire of skills shared by groups of different professionals and their overlapping identities as designers
and users. These resources are made visible by the article’s epistemological and methodological approach to
the study of web design as a collaborative activity.
# 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Collaboration; Web design; Knowledge repertoire; Interface usability; Distributed cognition; Situated
learning

1. Introduction

Web design is a relatively new form of work. Initially, it was considered to be solely a technical
activity performed by an individual. Indeed, it was assumed that correct design carried out by a
skilled technician was all that was necessary to ensure the functionality and usability of products.
Recently, however, this technical-individualist view has been replaced by an interpretation
that highlights the importance of the social and collaborative practices enacted among
designers. Recent studies, in particular, have described technical design as a composite social
activity situated in specific work contexts (see Bødker and Christiansen, 1997; Suchman, 2000;

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (F. Alby), [email protected] (C. Zucchermaglio).

0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2007.10.008
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Newman, 1998; Henderson, 1999; Bucciarelli, 2002; Aakhus and Jackson, 2005; Alby and
Zucchermaglio, 2007).
The conviction that social skills are crucial is also widespread among practitioners. These
skills are, for example, the ability to translate technical questions into non-technical language, to
understand the requirements of customers and users, to know how to collaborate with other
professionals (for example commercial managers with engineers) in the creation of products.
Such skills are considered useful for the construction of good products and to maintain an agile
and rapid work process (see for instance the Manifesto for Agile Software Development,
www.agilemanifesto.org).
But exactly why is collaboration beneficial? And in what way does collaboration support an
effective design process?
This paper seeks to answer these questions by illustrating the ways in which collaboration
among designers supports the quality of work and its products in an Italian Internet company.
It will examine two aspects in particular –briefly described below – which are particularly
important for the functioning of the organization and of the technology produced.

2. Talking at work

In the history of social psychology, the interactionist tradition maintains that the distinctive
psychological-social feature of the group resides in its nature as a set of individuals-in-
relationship: sharing of the same field is the necessary condition for interaction to take place and
for joint actions to be carried out (Lewin, 1948; Asch, 1952). This system of shared meaning and
joint actions therefore resides neither in single individuals nor externally to them, but in the
relations among them.
The space for individual action is considered to be connected to that of others: in order for
actions to be performed, they are negotiated and publicly discussed with the other members of the
group (Wenger, 1998). Over time, these actions form a repertoire of shared practices that
organize the daily lives of the groups and constitute a set of resources that can be drawn upon to
pursue the ‘common enterprise’ and a process of collective learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991;
Orr, 1996; Boden, 1994; Wenger, 1998).
A recent strand of interdisciplinary research has studied interactions in organizations,
highlighting that, in order for people to be able to work, they must constantly agree amongst
themselves on who will do what, when it will be done, how it will be done, and so on (see Luff
et al., 2000; Engeström and Middleton, 1996). This collaboration is so pervasive that it is often
impossible to distinguish between collective action and individual action: all activities, in fact,
are shared and coordinated to produce joint courses of action. Even apparently individual actions
(like reading, writing, working in front of a computer screen) are made publicly visible so as to
permit the construction and maintenance of the forms of reciprocal coordination necessary for
management of the work. For this reason, too, the unit of analysis used by this strand of research
is not the individual but the group in action, and the significant empirical data are interactive
practices (discursive, visual and material) among actors. It is through the integrated analysis of
discourse, gestures, and body language as well as of the material and technological infrastructure
that joint work activities – such as planning (Suchman, 2000), seeing (Goodwin, 1994;
Hindmarsh and Heath, 2000), reasoning (Hutchins and Klausen, 1996), decision making (Alby
and Zucchermaglio, 2006), and so on – become observable events.
Observation-based studies on technical professions (see in particular those by Orr, 1996 and
Suchman, 2007) have evidenced that the interpretation of technology-mediated events is an
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inevitably problematic and discursive activity, and that it constitutes a crucial component of
professional competence. It is in fact through joint accounts and interpretations, within triangular
relations which also include the technology itself, that technicians construct a stock of distributed
knowledge and pragmatic understanding which is one of the most valuable and enduring
outcomes of their collaboration. In the particular case described here, we shall see how this
mechanism is used not only to support the organization’s functioning, but also to create
user-friendly technologies.

3. Pursuing usability

The creation of user-friendly technologies was initially considered to be only a technical

issue. Later on, experience and studies on cognitive ergonomics showed that constructing
advanced technological products is no guarantee of their usability.
For example, it may happen that these advanced technologies are too complicated for some
categories of users or, more simply, do not correspond to their needs and habits.
Therefore, the idea that also the usability of technologies should be designed, and not just their
technical characteristics, began gradually to spread among designers. To this end, once products
had been finalized, it became common practice to test them with ‘experimental’ users in
laboratory-simulated situations. These usability tests led to great improvements in the design of
technological interfaces, but they also had many shortcomings: (1) the users recruited for the
simulations often had characteristics, skills and motivations very different from those for
the technology had been designed; (2) the social, organizational and technological practices of
the communities of end users were not considered to be important, as demonstrated by the fact
that they were absent in the artificial laboratory settings; (3) the interaction between user and
technology was considered to be individual and mental, so that no account was taken of the
complex phenomena involving local social and organizational mechanisms; (4) furthermore,
although these usability tests often formed part of the design process, they were too often
conducted only during the final stage, when the product had already been finalized.
The next step was that of greater integration between the design phase and use situations. This
shift was made possible by the research tradition which developed in Scandinavia during the
1970s and envisaged the use of prototypes and the involvement of ‘real’ users (Kensing and
Blomberg, 1998). This tradition was the referent for a series of participatory designs which
reversed the conception of users as passive and inexpert. In these cases, the users participated in
the design from the initial stages onwards, and used the prototypes created during their daily
activities. On this view, in fact, incorporating the products created into everyday work contexts
was considered essential for their accurate evaluation.
These experiences of participatory design were often preceded by observation-based studies
carried out in the workplaces where the technologies were to be used later on a daily basis
(see Orr, 1996; Heath and Luff, 2000; Suchman, 2007). These studies showed that: (1) the use of
technological instruments is always mediated by collaboration and social interaction among
members of professional communities; (2) this interaction is more narrative than cognitive;
(3) there is no one technology (for example the most technologically advanced one) which
prevails over the others; rather, there is simultaneous and integrated use of heterogeneous old and
new technologies.
These empirical research studies showed that users talk, not only in a dialogue amongst
themselves but also addressing and including the technology, in a kind of three-way conversation
aptly defined as a ‘‘trialogue’’ (Suchman, 2002a). In other words, users give voice and body to
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what, according to them, is happening ‘within’ the technology, making it visible to the others
(designers and researchers included). This is most evident in certain interactive occasions: for
example, when the functioning of the technology is problematic (see Bødker and Grønbæk, 1996;
Orr, 1996; Alby and Zucchermaglio, 2006) or when it is not visible to the users (Newman, 1998;
Alby and Zucchermaglio, 2007), or when an expert user explains how things work to a less expert
user or one with different skills (the case examined in this article).
These social situations are essential for designers to be able to ‘outthink the user’, that is,
assume the user’s viewpoint and take account of it in the design: an aspect so important and
pervasive in their deliberations ‘‘that they must frequently address the question of what the user
will do, will be like, or will feel, as an element in arriving at their design decisions’’ (Sharrock
and Button, 1997:92).
According to Suchman (2002b), the distinction between users and designers – a defect in
traditional design, opportunely denounced by participatory design – is never so clear-cut.
Instead, there exists a wide range of intermediate roles: ‘‘this simple designer/user distinction
obscures the realities of system development in two ways. First, it draws as unambiguous what
is in practice a highly shifting and perspectival boundary, missing the ways in which
professional designers are themselves among the most intensive of technology users on the one
hand, and making invisible the multiple forms of vernacular design-in-use on the other. At
the same time, the simple dualism closes off our possibilities for recognizing the many subtle
and profound differences that actually do divide us, and for replacing the designer/user
opposition with a rich, densely structured landscape of identities and working relations, within
which we might begin to move with some awareness and clarity of our various positions’’
(Suchman, 2002b:141).
Studied as a daily work practice, design is therefore not characterized by a clear boundary
between production and use, or between designers and users. With removal of this boundary, the
underlying assumption that technical expertise is the only form of knowledge necessary for the
design of technological systems fails as well.
But what other skills come into play? To carry out what activity? And what organizational
solutions must be found to outthink users?

4. Entering the setting

The company (henceforth called ‘Energy’, a pseudonym) in which we carried out our research
project manages a portal providing services to a mass audience (personalized homepages, news,
e-mail, SMS, thematic channels, e-commerce, etc.). It has around 40 employees, divided into two
main work groups: producers and engineers. The former manage the editorial content, the latter
the portal systems and applications.
The production process is organized so that new projects are planned by the producers and
then implemented by the engineers. For the engineers, the producers are therefore internal
clients, and often the users of the applications that the engineers build for them.
In this article we analyze the interactive practices used to design an advertising banner to be
inserted into the homepage of the Internet portal which the company develops and maintains.
Creation of a banner is a good example of a type of work activity with certain specific
characteristics widespread in Internet companies: it is a brief task, it is an extra (unscheduled)
activity, it is urgent, and it requires the collaboration of producers and engineers.
This type of activity is not unusual; in fact, it takes up a good percentage of the overall work
load and is carried on alongside of projects requiring a longer time-scale, in which the design and
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implementation stages are more temporally distant and the activities are undertaken mainly
within one’s own professional group (engineers or producers).
The data were collected during a three-month ethnography using field observations, video
recordings, and interviews. During the first month, we carried out preliminary field observations
intended to describe the everyday organization of work practices. Interviews with key informants
were also conducted during this phase. In the months that followed, we videotaped about 10 h of
interactions, which were transcribed using the Jefferson notation system (Jefferson, 1989). In
order to obtain a broader view of the work practices under study, we also collected instant
messenger logs (about 3 h), e-mails relating to the interactions (23 items), papers relating to the
interactions (10 items), photographs (20 items), print screens of the website and various
applications (10 items). The analysis of the entire data corpus enabled us to describe the specific
organizational and professional features of Energy. Conversation analysis was applied to the
discursive and interactive data in order to reveal the situated and emergent organization of joint
design activities.
Our interest in the technologies, as well as in the properties of the space and environment and
the role of the body in interaction, led us to analyze visual as well as discursive data. Besides
viewing videos and analysing the materials collected, we also constructed visual representations
of the data. These representations consisted of conversational transcripts and images taken from
the video, which were sometimes integrated with graphic representations in order to highlight
particular aspects (see Goodwin, 2000, 2003).

5. Shaping semiotic objects

In order to create the advertising banner commissioned by one of Energy’s commercial

partners, producer Luca goes to engineer Paolo (both names are pseudonyms) with an idea of how
this banner should be done and with a suggestion of how it should be created on the computer (i.e.
by inserting a slot on the homepage, also called ‘mesp’ or ‘my energy start page’). This
suggestion is discussed during the interaction with Paolo (see Extract 1).
Paolo’s request to ‘‘look at it together’’ produces a sequence in which the new object is
gradually ‘designed’ on the monitor (where the homepage is visible) via the discourses and
gestures of both interlocutors. Through this progressive construction Paolo eventually ‘sees’ the
new object (as marked by ‘‘m::’’ in turn 10) (see Extract 2).
Luca seems to know what product he wants to achieve, but cannot find the words to identify it
and communicate it to Paolo: in fact he mainly uses gestures (he moves his hand backwards and
forwards in Extract 1 and in frame 4 of Extract 2) together with ‘gestural sketches’ on the
homepage to represent a graphical object for which no name yet exists within the historical
repertoire of meanings shared by the members of this professional community (see Henderson,
1999, on how this visual modality is typical of interactions among designers).
The gestures made on the screen to connect the two semiotic fields of the conversation
and homepage are able to give a provisional ‘spatial’ form to the object. A clear example
is when Luca says the word ‘‘here’’ while his hand traces a line from one side of the screen to
the other (Extract 1, frame 1, turn 5). The meaning of the deictic marker ‘‘here’’ is
understandable only through the gesture at the monitor, which locates the object within the
homepage.
This connection with the homepage on the monitor is essential for the construction of a
shared meaning. It enables reference to be made to scenarios and inscriptions present in the
environment which are selected and animated by gestures. The form of the new object seems
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Extract 1.

to emerge progressively, and it also defines and positions itself in respect to the other objects
already present on the homepage (‘‘between this and that’’, turn 6; ‘‘between this and this’’,
turn 7). Now that the new object is visible on the homepage in the virtual space created by the
gestures and conversation between the designers, the latter begin to plan its agency (its
functions) in detail: in turn 8 they realize what the object should do (‘‘a thing that crosses
everything’’).
Note that this object is no longer what Luca had in mind at the beginning (turn 1), but rather
an object progressively built during the interaction with Paolo, who has also given voice and
space during the design to specific technical aspects and constraints. With respect to the start
of the interaction (when it could have been a slot or an element to add to ‘mesp’, short for My
Energy Start Page), the new object, thanks to its discursively and gesturally shaped
boundaries, gradually increases its ontological status: it becomes an action (‘‘a thing
that crosses everything’’, turn 8), with also an analogical and categorical name (‘‘like zarco’’,
turn 9).
Paolo’s full comprehension (marked by the ‘‘m::’’ in turn 10) occurs when the object is given a
name; this enables him to recognize it as belonging to a category of objects, viz., ‘‘zarco type’’
objects.
The utility of this attribution by the designers to a class of objects pertaining to the designers’
shared repertoire shows that no design product is ever entirely ‘new’: its interactive construction
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is based from the outset on a historical repertoire of shared professional practices, which enable
Paolo and Luca to understand each other, and to actively allocate the current object to a category
of other objects (the ‘zarco’) which they have already designed in the past.
This anchoring in earlier experiences of designing similar objects is also essential for
designing the functionality of these objects. By drawing on what they have already produced
during the course of their interactive history, the designers also construct the agency of new

Extract 2.
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Extract 2 (Continued ).

products (in addition to constructing their agency as designers); thus, they innovate the stock
of common professional practices on which their collaboration is based and on which they
draw.
Collaboration enables the designers (a) to reconcile the requests of the producers and the
technical constraints of the engineers, giving shape to a new product resulting from this
interaction; (b) to create this new product rapidly (within 10 min).
Collaboration also enables them to construct the framework of shared meanings necessary for
conceptualizing and progressively realizing new products. This ability to imagine new objects
together is particularly important for all design activities, also in particular for professions in
which the object of the work is not visible (as in the case, for example, of physicists,
neuroscientists, archaeologists, chemists, architects, etc.; see Ochs et al., 1996; Lynch, 1985;
Goodwin, 1994, 1997; Murphy, 2004).. In this way, design can be jointly produced through the
use of semiotic resources, including the participants’ discourse, their gestures, and the material
environment around them. Thanks to these semiotic resources, designers jointly transform the
physical world into accountable ‘future’ phenomena in relation to the aims of the design action
(see also Fasulo and Zucchermaglio, in press).
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6. Constituting future and current agencies

This joint imaginative ability is also supported by the presence of the different professional
skills of Luca and Paolo, as evidenced by the following interaction, in which the designers are
constructing the text trailer, an essential part of the advertising banner mentioned in the previous
section. Paolo is writing the program required to create the space dedicated to the text trailer on
the homepage. This will allow Luca to later insert and change the text autonomously whenever
required. As he writes the program, Paolo describes what he is doing to Luca in order to construct
and maintain a common reference to the design activity (see Extract 3).
Paolo is talking about the shape of the text trailer, which is ‘‘as wide as it is high’’ (turn 17). From
Luca’s question (‘‘you mean it’s full width?’’, turn 18), Paolo understands where he lost Luca and,
in turn 19, stops speaking about the text trailer and starts talking in terms of the actions that Luca
must perform in order to write it down (‘‘it has no effect on how many characters you can put it’s just
that this is inconvenient if you have to fill a’’, turn 19). From Luca’s response, (‘‘ah:: (I‘ve) got it- got
it- got it’’, turn 20) we see that this was precisely what Luca did not understand.

Extract 3.
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Extract 3 (Continued ).

What Paolo manages to do – and Luca does not – is to see, through the shape of the text trailer,
the designer’s actions that produce it. This ability pertains more to engineers than to producers
because it is linked to the different nature of the activities of the two professional groups: while
producers are concerned with the graphical aspects and content of the site, engineers are
concerned with how to translate these objects into the commands and programs needed to carry
them out.
Paolo’s effort to show to, and share with, a producer the specific professional practices of his
professional group (that of the engineers) through what we could call ‘translation practices’
serves to achieve various working and organizational objectives.
The first outcome of these collaborative practices is the progressive construction of a stock of
knowledge common to both groups and which partially overlaps with the typical and specific
professional skills of each. Although the continuous ‘‘online commentary’’ (Heritage and Stivers,
1999) given by Paolo may slow down the activity (as in the case examined), it is nevertheless
deemed a good investment, as it supports speed and tacit understanding in future common activities.