Exploring Individual User Satisfaction Within User-Led Development

User-led development is gaining popularity with organizations wishing to increase user involvement and control. Typically in this approach a small group of users is given the responsibility for managing the project and representing the user community in determining requirements, testing, training, and system implementation. This paper explores the end user’s perception of the quality of his or her representation and satisfaction with the application system within an organization employing user-led development. The end-user communities for two systems developed in a large Australian government corporation were surveyed. The results indicate that the user perception of representation is the most significant influence on user satisfaction—the correlation scores for the two systems studied were in excess of 0.6. Also of importance is the user’s perception of management support. Both systems recorded a low average score for user representativeness (2.5 and 2.7), which is attributed in part to the large number and geographic spread of the users and to the approach adopted by the user representatives in the user-led development team.