My reviewers: participatory design & crowd-sourced usability processes

This paper explores the benefits and consequences of employing crowd-sourced development and usability processes during the early stages of a software-development project. Our context is My Reviewers, a suite of web-based tools designed to facilitate document markup, team projects, peer review, e-portfolio review, and writing-program assessment. Since 2009, WPAs (Writing Program Administrators) at USF (University of South Florida) have been collaborating with instructors at USF as well as with WPAs and instructors at other colleges and universities to develop My Reviewers. To illustrate our development and usability processes and to highlight the benefits of working with diverse institutions, we provide a case study of a USF and University of Pennsylvania collaboration to develop e-portfolio tools. We conclude by noting ways our usability processes have matured along with the tool, including adoption of more traditional SCRUM methods and Microsoft Team Foundation Server.