Using Linkography and Situated FBS Co-Design Model to Explore User Participatory Conceptual Design Process
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Study objective may be more clearly described.
The discussion section is mixed with the results, and the authors forget to compare other works with their results in this section.
The conclusions could be more explicit, and maybe more strongly connected with the study objective.
The references may be completed with references from Processes Journal.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper contains some interesting insights. I think the topic is relevant and there are not that many empirical research using protocol analysis that include users in design teams so I found that very interesting. The paper is well structured and reads well. I still have a few comments that I think should be addressed before it could be published.
Major comments:
I think one limitation is that the research is based on a single team. It is not really clear how many teams the experiment involved. Is this work part of a bigger study with several teams? It should be made clear that this is exploratory research that involved very few teams. Protocol studies usually include at least 3 or 4 teams. I would avoid verb like ‘prove’ as the results are only based on one design session. A better way to formulate the findings would be to express results as trends that will need to be verify with more data (more teams).
Authors could add a study limitation sections that describe the limitations (the number of teams analyzed is one) and provide a rational for addressing it in later work.
One other concern I have is the lack of integration between the tools and metrics used (linkograph with CM, entropy based on links, PS indicator etc) with what those metrics say about the co-design process between the user and designers. All the results are in itself interesting but there are so many metrics that we lose the aim of it and how it addresses the research aim and objective. My suggestion is either to delete some of those results that are less relevant to the overall goal of the results; or to better tighten what the metrics bring to analyzing designing processes with users. As of now, the results appear like a list of descriptors of the design session but their relationship are not well illustrated.
Minor comments:
Please add references to Table 1 and 2 since they are based on previous work.
I am not convince it is necessary to have Fig. 2 and Fig.3 I think Fig 3 will suffice to get the message across.
The linkography is the method and the graph is a linkograph. In the text, linkography is used to describe the graph. Please adjust the terms.
There are a few typos along the text, example: Table 2 Foucs > Focus. Please proof the paper for typos, spelling and grammar issues.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for this updated version of the article. Overall, I think it looks great. Here are a few minor comments / suggestions:
Figure 4 : either add in caption what U, D1 etc stand for (User, Designer 1 etc.) or put the full caption directly on the graph. This way, if the reader is just scanning through, they can understand the figure without searching the text. Same for Figure 6 and 7.
I would replace U by user and D1 by Designer 1 in the text. Maybe there is a better way to label them so that we understand that the ‘user’ is a co-designer or team member, and not a user that 'tests' the end product.
4.3 Please add a sentence to explain what Correspondence analysis is and how to interpret de graph.
Typos:
Line 41 check sentence, seem like ‘visualization’ does not belong there.
Line 85 proposed by (add by after proposed)
Figure 7 : Dimention > dimension
Line 460: adopted the combination method of linkography the situated FBS co-design model to explore the design cognitive activities > adopted the combination method of linkography and the situated FBS co-design model to explore the design cognitive activities
Font size looks uneven in some parts of the text.
Line 514 user participatory > user participation. Or reformulate: ... during the co-design process in participatory design.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
