326 research outputs found
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GenderMag: A Method for Evaluating Software’s Gender Inclusiveness
In recent years, research into gender differences has established that individual differences in how people problem-solve often cluster by gender. Research also shows that these differences have direct implications for software that aims to support users’ problem-solving activities, and that much of this software is more supportive of problem-solving processes favored (statistically) more by males than by females. However, there is almost no work considering how software practitioners—such as User Experience (UX) professionals or software developers—can find gender-inclusiveness issues like these in their software. To address this gap, we devised the GenderMag method for evaluating problem-solving software from a gender-inclusiveness perspective. The method includes a set of faceted personas that bring five facets of gender difference research to life, and embeds use of the personas into a concrete process through a gender-specialized Cognitive Walkthrough. Our empirical results show that a variety of practitioners who design software—without needing any background in gender research—were able to use the GenderMag method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in problem-solving software. Our results also show that the issues the practitioners found were real and fixable. This work is the first systematic method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in software, so that practitioners can design and produce problem-solving software that is more usable by everyone
Human Factors in End-user Development of Marketing-IS: A Behavioral User Profiling Approach
AbstractMarketing-IS research has recently focused on the development of personalization systems that are based on the modeling of consumer behavior and consumer heterogeneity regarding their distinct needs and preferences. However, personalization approaches in the design and development stage of Marketing-IS have not been widely studied in the End-User Development (EUD) research area. The lack of such research studies results in the development of Marketing-IS tools that neglect the differences in the end-user behavior, and artifacts of low performance and reusability. Attempting to figure out how end-users can participate in the design and construction of Marketing-IS in an efficient way, research suggests the ‘construction’ of end- users behavioral profiles based on human factors. Recent evidence reveal that human factors such as gender and expertise level can influence and even determine the end-users’, behavior, and consequently performance, while end-users interact with EUD environments. This paper presents a methodological approach in which we identify different behavioral user-profiles, named ‘user-categories’ based on behavioural attributes derived by the human factors of gender and expertise level. The resulting user- categories can be applied in the modeling mechanism of adaptive EUD system environments. Such an approach is projected to implicitly assist the end-users in the enhancement of their performance during the development task of Marketing-I
Gender differences and programming environments: Across programming populations
ABSTRACT Although there has been significant research into gender regarding educational and workplace practices, there has been little investigation of gender differences pertaining to problem solving with programming tools and environments. As a result, there is little evidence as to what role gender plays in programming tools-and what little evidence there is has involved mainly novice and enduser programmers in academic studies. This paper therefore investigates how widespread such phenomena are in industrial programming situations, considering three disparate programming populations involving almost 3000 people and three different programming platforms in industry. To accomplish this, we analyzed four industry "legacy" studies from a gender perspective, triangulating results against each other and against a new fifth study, also in industry. We investigated gender differences in software feature usage and in tinkering/exploring software features. Furthermore, we examined how such differences tied to confidence. Our results showed significant gender differences in all three factors-across all populations and platforms
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Gender Pluralism in Problem-Solving Software
Although there has been significant research into gender regarding educational and workplace
practices, there has been little awareness of gender differences as they pertain to software tools,
such as spreadsheet applications, that try to support end users in problem-solving tasks. Although
such software tools are intended to be gender agnostic, we believe that closer examination of this
premise is warranted. Therefore, in this paper, we report an end-to-end investigation into gender
differences with spreadsheet software. Our results showed gender differences in feature usage,
feature-related confidence, and tinkering (playful exploration) with features. Then, drawing
implications from these results, we designed and implemented features for our spreadsheet
prototype that took the gender differences into account. The results of an evaluation on this
prototype showed improvements for both males and females, and also decreased gender
differences in some outcome measures, such as confidence. These results are encouraging, but
also open new questions for investigation. We also discuss how our results compare to
generalization studies performed with a variety of other software platforms and populations.Keywords: gender, spreadsheet debugging, problem-solving softwareKeywords: gender, spreadsheet debugging, problem-solving softwar
Female Students in Computer Science Education: Understanding Stereotypes, Negative Impacts, and Positive Motivation
Although female students engage in coding courses, only a small percentage of
them plan to pursue computer science (CS) as a major when choosing a career
path. Gender differences in interests, sense-of belonging, self-efficacy, and
engagement in CS are already present at an early age. This article presents an
overview of gender stereotypes in CS and summarizes negative impressions female
students between 12 and 15 experience during CS classes, as well as influences
that may be preventing girls from taking an interest in CS. The study herein
draws on a systematic review of 28 peer-reviewed articles published since 2006.
The findings of the review point to the existence of the stereotypical image of
a helpless, uninterested, and unhappy "Girl in Computer Science". It may be
even more troubling a construct than that of the geeky, nerdy male counterpart,
as it is rooted in the notion that women are technologically inept and
ill-suited for CS careers. Thus, girls think they must be naturally
hyper-intelligent in order to pursue studies in CS, as opposed to motivated,
interested, and focused to succeed in those fields. Second, based on the
review, suggestions for inclusive CS education were summarized. The authors
argue that in order to make CS more inclusive for girls, cultural implications,
as well as stereotypization in CS classrooms and CS education, need to be
recognized as harmful. These stereotypes and cultural ideas should be
eliminated by empowering female students through direct encouragement,
mentoring programs, or girls-only initiatives.Comment: 22 page
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Understanding and supporting end-user debugging strategies
End users' programs are fraught with errors, costing companies millions of dollars. One reason may be that researchers and tool designers have not yet focused on end-user debugging strategies. To investigate this possibility, this dissertation presents eight empirical studies and a new strategy-based end-user debugging tool for Excel, called StratCel.
These studies revealed insights about males' and females' end-user debugging strategies at four levels of abstraction (moves, tactics, stratagems, and strategies), leading to specific implications for the design of tools. Particular results include a set of ten debugging stratagems, which generalized across three environments: the research spreadsheet environment Forms/3, commercial Windows PowerShell, and commercial Microsoft Excel. There was also evidence of the stratagems' generalization to a fourth set of environments: interactive application design environments, such as Dreamweaver, Flash, and Blend. Males and females statistically preferred and were effective with different stratagems, and females' stratagems were less well-supported by environments than males' were. In addition to what stratagems our participants used, we also investigated how these stratagems were used to find bugs, fix bugs, and evaluate fixes. Furthermore, a Sensemaking approach revealed end-user debugging strategies and the advantages and disadvantages of each.
We then built StratCel, which demonstrates a strategy-centric approach to tool design by explicitly supporting several of the implications from our studies. StratCel's evaluation revealed significant benefits of a strategy-centric approach to tool design: participants using the tool found twice as many bugs as participants using standard Excel and fixed four times as many bugs (including two bugs which had not been purposefully inserted by researchers and had gone unnoticed in previous studies). Further, StratCel participants did so much faster than participants using standard Excel. For example, participants using StratCel found the first bug 90% faster and fixed it 80% faster than participants without the tool. Finally, this strategy-based approach helped the participants who needed it the most: boosting novices' debugging performance near experienced participants' improved levels. The fact that this approach helped everyone -- males and females, novices and experts —- demonstrates the significant advantage of strategy-centric approaches over feature-centric approaches to designing tools that aim to support end-user debugging
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