Observation, Annotation and Analysis of Design Activities: How to Find an Appropriate Tool?

Recently, design researchers have been interested in observation-analysis approach to study design activities. This is how the annotation and annotation tools have been introduced into the design research. This paper describes the annotation process as an approach in design activity studies and proposes a sequential structure for the annotation process. The research objective is to characterize an ideal annotation tool, designed and adapted for design studies; in this objective, the paper presents several design researches in the context of collaborative design and user-centred design, using video annotation tools, and explains how these tools have been employed. We describe the evaluation criteria for annotation tools and provide a functional comparison with the explained tools. We had explored the existing functionalities of different software to extract a list of desired characteristics of an ideal annotation tool for the design research and studies. Such an effort can provide a guideline in video annotation for design researchers.