Checklists For Everyone: Developing Design Principles For Everyday Organizations
Summary
Despite their proven benefits, checklists are minimally used and researched in everyday domains such as hospitality, retail, and education. A lack of design knowledge about checklists in these organizations is one of the barriers to checklist use and research. The aim of this research is to develop design knowledge that can serve as a basis for these organizations to improve checklists for their business processes. After analyzing widely researched checklists in aviation and healthcare industries, we en- gineered requirements and developed design principles that contribute to the design knowledge of everyday organizations.
The design principles were validated on their applicability by conducting six interviews with potential end-users in the domains of retail, hospitality, and education. The validation shows that two design principles seem reusable, one design principle seems less suitable for reuse, and one design principle seems not suitable for reuse.
This research contributes a set of design principles for checklists to be used in everyday organizations, which results in a potential rise in checklist use and research in these organizations. Future research could analyze other domains, validate design principles in other domains, and use different methods of developing and validating the design principles.