Towards a model of quantitative personas

La herramienta Personas es una herramienta extendida en el mundo del diseño de producto y el diseño web. En los últimos años nuevas disciplinas como el diseño de servicios y el diseño estratégico han hecho que las herramientas propias del Design Thinking adquieran un nuevo carácter. Así, se considera que la herramienta Personas puede ayudar a políticos y gestores de los sistemas de salud en el diseño de nuevas políticas sociales y nuevos servicios sanitarios que mejoren la calidad de vida de una sociedad envejecida. La diversidad existente en la sociedad, hace necesarias nuevas herramientas que simplifiquen y soporten la toma de decisiones en datos cuantitativos. En este estudio se propone un nuevo modelo de Personas cuantitativo que se alimenta de estadísticas existentes sobre dependencia y sobre personas mayores. En primer lugar, se analizan distintos métodos de análisis estadístico que pueden ayudar en la identificación de segmentos de población. De esta forma, se seleccionan los métodos más adecuados al ámbito de aplicación. Finalmente, se propone un método de creación de perfiles de Personas a partir de dichos segmentos y se generan perfiles preliminares. En futuros trabajos se contrastarán dichos perfiles con profesionales de la política y de la salud.Personas is an extended tool in the area of product design and web design. In recent years new disciplines such as service design and strategic design have made the tools of Design Thinking acquire a new character. Thus, it is considered that Personas can help policy makers and managers of healthcare systems in the design of new social policies and new health services that improve the quality of life of an aging society. The diversity existing in society, makes necessary new tools that simplify and support decision making in quantitative data. In this study, a new model of Quantitative Personas is proposed. This tool will be based on existing statistics on dependence and on elderly people. First, different methods of statistical analysis that can help in the identification of population segments are analyzed. In this way, the most appropriate methods are selected for the scope of application. Finally, a method of creating profiles of Personas from these segments is proposed and preliminary profiles are generated. Profiles will be contrasted with professionals in politics and health in future works

Towards improving ViSQOL (Virtual Speech Quality Objective Listener) Using Machine Learning Techniques

Vast amounts of sound data are transmitted every second over digital networks. VoIP services and cellular networks transmit speech data in increasingly greater volumes. Objective sound quality models provide an essential function to measure the quality of this data in real-time. However, these models can suffer from a lack of accuracy with various degradations over networks. This research uses machine learning techniques to create one support vector regression and three neural network mapping models for use with ViSQOLAudio. Each of the mapping models (including ViSQOL and ViSQOLAudio) are tested against two separate speech datasets in order to comparatively study accuracy results. Despite the slight cost in positive linear correlation and slight increase in error rate, the study finds that a neural network mapping model with ViSQOLAudio provides the highest levels of accuracy in objective speech quality measurement. In some cases, the accuracy levels can be over double that of ViSQOL. The research demonstrates that ViSQOLAudio can be altered to provide an objective speech quality metric greater than that of ViSQOL

Supporting document management in complex multitask environments

In this thesis, the challenges for the support of information workers in the domain of personal information management are addressed. In Chapter 1 three major challenges are identified: 1) information overload and fragmentation, 2) multitasking within an unstructured, frequently interrupted workflow, and 3) increasing mobility demand. It has been argued that dedicated support of current needs in personal information management will help to overcome the challenges, reduce information and cognitive overload, and facilitate performance of information workers. Investigating the current needs of information workers, one has to focus on those that are currently supported by paper document management and transfer the mechanisms of this support to the digital domain. Our studies have addressed the role of paper documents in dealing with each of the three identified challenges. In the first study, presented in Chapter 2, paper document management has been discussed in relation with information overload and fragmentation. The study used contextual interviewing technique, with participants interviewed at their workplace. The results showed that information workers keep actively using task-related collections of paper documents. By grouping task-related documents from different origins together, information workers create a representation of a "stable state" within a task, which helps to resume the task after an interruption that is almost inevitable in a multitasking environment. To investigate task-switching patterns, related to document manipulation, and factors influencing the occurrence of the patterns, an observational study was performed, described in Chapter 3. This study identified eight task switching patterns, which varied in the explicitness of an indication of a task state in the environment and in the level of subject’s activity directed to indicate the task state at the moments of switching. Among the identified influencing factors, the reason for the switch (self-switching or external interruption) had an effect on the occurrence of subjectactive patterns. Self-switching usually resulted in user-active document manipulation in the environment which could not be observed during external interruptions. The domain where the last action was performed also had an influence on the switching pattern, with active manipulation of documents occurring more often in the physical than in the digital domain. It has been concluded that, while switching tasks in an unstructured multitasking workflow, manipulation of paper documents plays an important role in creating a stable state at the moments of switching between tasks. We hypothesized that paper documents possess visually distinctive attributes that are associated with the semantics of the related tasks. By manipulating task-related documents at the moments of task switching, these visually distinctive attributes change, reflecting the changes in the task state. This hypothesis has been tested in a study using triad elicitation interview technique in combination with laddering, presented in Chapter 4. As a result, we developed a clustered model of relationships among identified visual cues of paper documents and semantic judgments of the tasks. The relationships among clusters have been analyzed based on three criteria: content-dependency, flexibility, and effort, which together define ease of manipulation for each cluster of visual cues. It has been concluded that physical environment, in particular, task-relevant paper documents, allow flexible encoding of task-related semantic cues into available environmental visual cues. This mechanism needs to be transferred to the digital domain, especially to support mobility of information workers. This research suggested that the extensive use of paper documents in the digital era can be largely explained by the embodiment of paper as a part of physical environment in which a human acts. Chapter 5 summarized the results of all studies into a set of requirements for the design of a personal information management system. We proposed a layered framework for presenting the requirements from the point of view of task decomposition and discussed the needs of the information workers related to each layer. For each of the aforementioned layers within the framework, requirements for the design of a digital system were presented and discussed in detail. Chapter 6 revised the challenges discussed in Chapter 1 from the point of view of the findings, summarized methodology and contribution of the research and reflected on the most prominent results

Quantifying diversity in user experience

Evaluation should be integral to any design activity. Evaluation in innovative product development practices however is highly complicated. It often needs to be applied to immature prototypes, while at the same time users’ responses may greatly vary across different individuals and situations. This thesis has focused on methods and tools for inquiring into users’ experiences with interactive products. More specifically, it had three objectives: a) to conceptualize the notion of diversity in subjective judgments of users’ experiences with interactive products, b) to establish empirical evidence for the prevalence of diversity, and c) to provide a number of methodological tools for the study of diversity in the context of product development. Two critical sources of diversity in the context of users’ experiences with interactive products were identified and respective methodological solutions were proposed: a) understanding interpersonal diversity through personal attribute judgments, and b) understanding the dynamics of experience through experience narratives. Personal Attribute Judgments, and in particular, the Repertory Grid Technique, is proposed as an alternative to standardized psychometric scales, in measuring users’ responses to artifacts in the context of parallel design. It is argued that traditional approaches that rely on the a-priori definition of the measures by the researchers have at least two limitations. First, such approaches are inherently limited as researchers might fail to consider a given dimension as relevant for the given product and context, or they might simply lack validated measurement scales for a relevant dimension. Secondly, such approaches assume that participants are able to interpret and position a given statement that is defined by the researcher to their own context. Recent literature has challenged this assumption, suggesting that in certain cases participants are unable to interpret the personal relevance of the statement in their own context, and might instead employ shallow processing, that is respond to surface features of the language rather than attaching personal relevance to the question. In contrast, personal attributes are elicited from each individual respondent, instead of being a-priori imposed by the experimenter, and thus are supposed to be highly relevant to the individual. However, personal attributes require substantially more complex quantitative analysis procedures. It is illustrated that traditional analysis procedures fail to bring out the richness of the personal attribute judgments and two new Multi-Dimensional Scaling procedures that extract multiple complementary views from such datasets are proposed. An alternative approach for the measurement of the dynamics of experience over time is proposed that relies on a) the retrospective elicitation of idiosyncratic selfreports of one’s experiences with a product, the so-called experience narratives, and b) the extraction of generalized knowledge from these narratives through computational content analysis techniques. iScale, a tool that aims at increasing users’ accuracy and effectiveness in recalling their experiences with a product is proposed. iScale uses sketching in imposing a structured process in the reconstruction of one’s experiences from memory. Two different versions of iScale, each grounded in a distinct theory of how people reconstruct emotional experiences from memory, were developed and empirically tested. A computational approach for the extraction of generalized knowledge from experience narratives, that combines traditional coding procedures with computational approaches for assessing the semantic similarity between documents, is proposed and compared with traditional content analysis. Through these two methodological contributions, this thesis argues against averaging in the subjective evaluation of interactive products. It proposes the development of interactive tools that can assist designers in moving across multiple levels of abstractions of empirical data, as design-relevant knowledge might be found on all these levels

Characterizing the diversity in users’ perceptions

This paper proposes a novel approach to modeling the diversity in users’ perceptions, based on a mixture of qualitative and quantitative techniques: the Repertory Grid Technique and Multi-Dimensional Scaling. The proposed method can be used for identifying diverse user groups that can inspire a range of personas, or for selecting subjects for field studies and usability tests. In a case study we explored the perceptions of product creators and end users towards an innovative product in its early design stage

Characterizing the diversity in users' perceptions

This paper proposes a novel approach to modeling the diversity in users' perceptions, based on a mixture of qualitative and quantitative techniques: the Repertory Grid Technique and Multi-Dimensional Scaling. The proposed method can be used for identifying diverse user groups that can inspire a range of personas, or for selecting subjects for field studies and usability tests. In a case study we explored the perceptions of product creators and end users towards an innovative product in its early design stage