Co-Created Personas: Engaging and Empowering Users with Diverse Needs Within the Design Process

Personas are powerful tools for designing technology and envisioning its usage. They are widely used to imagine archetypal users around whom to orient design work. We have been exploring co-created personas as a technique to use in co-design with users who have diverse needs. Our vision was that this would broaden the demographic and liberate co-designers of their personal relationship with a health condition. This paper reports three studies where we investigated using co-created personas with people who had Parkinson’s disease, dementia or aphasia. Observational data of co-design sessions were collected and analysed. Findings revealed that the co-created personas encouraged users with diverse needs to engage with co-designing. Importantly, they also aforded additional benefts including empowering users within a more accessible design process. Refecting on the outcomes from the diferent user groups, we conclude with a discussion of the potential for co-created personas to be applied more broadly

Agile Requirements Engineering: A systematic literature review

Nowadays, Agile Software Development (ASD) is used to cope with increasing complexity in system development. Hybrid development models, with the integration of User-Centered Design (UCD), are applied with the aim to deliver competitive products with a suitable User Experience (UX). Therefore, stakeholder and user involvement during Requirements Engineering (RE) are essential in order to establish a collaborative environment with constant feedback loops. The aim of this study is to capture the current state of the art of the literature related to Agile RE with focus on stakeholder and user involvement. In particular, we investigate what approaches exist to involve stakeholder in the process, which methodologies are commonly used to present the user perspective and how requirements management is been carried out. We conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with an extensive quality assessment of the included studies. We identified 27 relevant papers. After analyzing them in detail, we derive deep insights to the following aspects of Agile RE: stakeholder and user involvement, data gathering, user perspective, integrated methodologies, shared understanding, artifacts, documentation and Non-Functional Requirements (NFR). Agile RE is a complex research field with cross-functional influences. This study will contribute to the software development body of knowledge by assessing the involvement of stakeholder and user in Agile RE, providing methodologies that make ASD more human-centric and giving an overview of requirements management in ASD.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Designing usable and secure software with IRIS and CAIRIS.

Everyone expects the products and services they use to be secure, but 'building security in' at the earliest stages of a system's design also means designing for use as well. Software that is unusable to end-users and unwieldy to developers and administrators may be insecure as errors and violations may expose exploitable vulnerabilities. This book shows how practitioners and researchers can build both security and usability into the design of systems. It introduces the IRIS framework and the open source CAIRIS platform that can guide the specification of secure and usable software. It also illustrates how IRIS and CAIRIS can complement techniques from User Experience, Security Engineering and Innovation & Entrepreneurship in ways that allow security to be addressed at different stages of the software lifecycle without disruption. Real-world examples are provided of the techniques and processes illustrated in this book, making this text a resource for practitioners, researchers, educators, and students

Towards an institutional PLE

PLEs in their broader sense (the ad-hoc, serendipitous and potentially chaotic set of tools that learners bring to their learning) are increasingly important for learners in the context of formal study. In this paper we outline the approach that we are taking at the University of Southampton in redesigning our teaching and learning infrastructure into an Institutional PLE. We do not see this term as an oxymoron. We define an Institutional PLE as an environment that provides a personalised interface to University data and services and at the same time exposes that data and services to a student’s personal tools. Our goal is to provide a digital platform that can cope with an evolving learning and teaching environment, as well as support the social and community aspects of the institution

Enabling Promethean Leaps: An Examination of Storytelling Techniques in Information Systems Development

People have used storytelling throughout history to instigate transformative change. Accordingly, one should expect as much of narrative techniques in information systems development (ISD) such as epics, user stories, and personas. However, existing research has focused on these techniques’ operational aspects rather than their potential for transformation or the extent to which they currently aid true transformative change in ISD. This study draws on the myth of Prometheus—the Greek god often used as a metaphorical symbol of technology’s radically innovative, transformative power. Expert interviews are used to develop Promethean principles that can be used to evaluate the transformative potential of narrative ISD techniques. It also identifies factors that undermine the practicality of such a Promethean lens

Developing Ontologies and Persona to Support and Enhance Requirements Engineering Activities – A Case Study

AbstractThis paper provides an insight into incorporating persona concept and developing ontologies to support requirements engineering activities via a university course registration web application system case study. The objectives are to examine (1) how the concept of persona, in the context of the concepts of viewpoint, goal, scenario, task, and requirement, may be integrated in a unified environment to enable stakeholders and developers gain a better understanding of target users’ needs and behaviors and identify missing requirements early in the requirements engineering process, and (2) how the concepts and their relationships may be explicitly specified ontologically to help establish a knowledge repository and foster a shared common understanding of target users’ needs and behaviors among developers and stakeholders during the requirements analysis and modeling activity. A five-step iterative ontology development process is developed to help guide developers in the process of building the ontologies for the case study. We present the persona and viewpoint documents created and the ontology specifications specified in Protégé-Frames via applying our ontology development process

Creating wheelchair-controlled video games: challenges and opportunities when involving young people with mobility impairments and game design experts

Although participatory design (PD) is currently the most acceptable and respectful process we have for designing technology, recent discussions suggest that there may be two barriers to the successful application of PD to the design of digital games: First, the involvement of audiences with special needs can introduce new practical and ethical challenges to the design process. Second, the use of non-experts in game design roles has been criticised in that participants lack skills necessary to create games of appropriate quality. To explore how domain knowledge and user involvement influence game design, we present results from two projects that addressed the creation of movement-based wheelchair-controlled video games from different perspectives. The first project was carried out together with a local school that provides education for young people with special needs, where we invited students who use wheelchairs to take part in design sessions. The second project involved university students on a game development course, who do not use wheelchairs, taking on the role of expert designers. They were asked to design concepts for wheelchair-controlled games as part of a final-year course on game design. Our results show that concepts developed by both groups were generally suitable examples of wheelchair-controlled motion-based video games, but we observed differences regarding level of detail of game concepts, and ideas of disability. Additionally, our results show that the design exercise exposed vulnerabilities in both groups, outlining that the risk of practical and emotional vulnerability needs to be considered when working with the target audience as well as expert designers

Conversations on a probable future: interview with Beatrice Fazi

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Methodological development

Book description: Human-Computer Interaction draws on the fields of computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and organisational and social sciences in order to understand how people use and experience interactive technology. Until now, researchers have been forced to return to the individual subjects to learn about research methods and how to adapt them to the particular challenges of HCI. This is the first book to provide a single resource through which a range of commonly used research methods in HCI are introduced. Chapters are authored by internationally leading HCI researchers who use examples from their own work to illustrate how the methods apply in an HCI context. Each chapter also contains key references to help researchers find out more about each method as it has been used in HCI. Topics covered include experimental design, use of eyetracking, qualitative research methods, cognitive modelling, how to develop new methodologies and writing up your research