Eventually everything connects

If you are reading these lines, you are probably curious about the type of experience that you would have as an attendee of this talk. You might wonder whether the topic would match your interests, whether the speaker will be good enough to satisfy your expectations, whether you will feel inspired, exhilarated, or whether you will have concrete tools to bring back to your work. While you are usually the ones shaping people’s experiences, you are striving for nice experiences as well. Designing for human experiences is one of the most challenging yet fascinating activities. It is a responsibility that we should embrace with humility and dedication. To face the complexity of our mission, we need to draw on theoretical knowledge, methodological skills and of course on our shared professional expertise, as a community. While UX practitioners are working hard at the front lines to design better products or services, scientists work in the shadows to develop and consolidate a myriad of novel and highly valuable UX methods. During this talk, you will discover the ever-growing UX toolbox that could greatly support you in collecting richer, insightful and more valid data. From scientific theories to pragmatic methods, from academia to industry, from Luxembourg to Puerto Rico… Eventually everything connects

Creative Pedagogical Activities for User Evaluation Methods Courses

In this contribution, we present three teaching activities used during a User Evaluation Methods course (Bachelor level): a self-exploration of methods, scenario-based debates around methodological choices, and a flipped-classroom video assignment. These are hands-on activities, brief and modular, that can be used or adapted to any similar course on user evaluation methods (on-campus or remote teaching). We describe each activity and reflect on their use, supported by students’ reflections on the course and insights from our teaching practice

Apports de l’ergonomie participative à l’amélioration de la culture de sécurité en milieu industriel

Cette communication présente les résultats d’une intervention d’ergonomie participative menée en milieu industriel au sein d’une usine d’un grand groupe sidérurgique. Dans le cadre de son programme de prévention des risques, cette entreprise participe chaque année à un challenge santé-sécurité consistant à mettre en place un programme d’actions sur une année et ce, de manière participative en créant des groupes de travail. Après quatre mois d’intervention, une enquête par questionnaire a été réalisée auprès des salariés du secteur impliqué afin d’étudier les impacts de la participation sur la culture de sécurité. Les résultats semblent prometteurs et montrent que les bénéfices de la participation sont multiples : un climat de sécurité plus positif et des attitudes et comportements plus sécuritaires. Cependant, plus que la simple participation, ce sont bien plutôt l’implication des employés dans le challenge et la satisfaction qu’ils en retirent qui garantissent ces effets positifs

Contributions of participatory ergonomics to the improvement of safety culture in an industrial context

This paper presents the results of an ergonomic intervention conducted within a blast furnace plant. As part of its risk prevention program, the company decided to set up an action plan, in a participatory manner, by setting up working groups to solve health & safety issues. This field mission involved 230 employees, 80 of whom participated actively by being incorporated into working groups. After four months of intervention, a questionnaire survey has been conducted among employees to study the effects of participation on the safety climate. The results seem promising and show that the benefits of participation are numerous: a more positive safety climate associated to safer attitudes and behaviors. However, rather than just participa- tion, it seems to be the employee involvement in the working groups and the satisfaction they derive from their participation that guarantee these positive results. Hence, participatory ergonomics seems to be an effective way to decrease the number of unsafe behaviors at work, provided that the type of participation has been previously well defined and organized according to the specific context of each organization

Toward a closer integration of usability into software development: a study of usability inputs in a model-driven engineering process

Even though the benefits of usability have widely been proven, it seems that development-oriented companies face many difficulties to introduce usability practices into their defined development processes. This paper describes the overall methodology deployed as an attempt to achieve a closer integration of usability practices in the software development process. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is used as a basis for this integration. Providing a precise framework composed of models and transformations, it allows to track usability problems and to highlight where exactly they occur in the development process. We will thus be able to link every step of the process to specific ergonomic inputs and to study their consequences on the usability of the generated system. Because MDE will only be used as a way among others to investigate some hypotheses on usability and User-Centered Design (UCD) in general, our results are expected to provide valuable and generic information on usability and UCD processes

How Acceptable Is This? How User Experience Factors Can Broaden our Understanding of the Acceptance of Privacy Trade-Offs

Privacy is a timely topic that is increasingly scrutinized in the public eye. In spite of privacy and security breaches, people still frequently compromise their privacy in exchange for certain benefits of a technology or a service. This study builds on both technology acceptance (TA) and user experience (UX) research in order to explore and build hypotheses regarding additional dimensions that might play a role in the acceptability of privacy tradeoffs that are not currently accounted for in TA models. Using four scenarios describing situations with potential privacy trade-offs, we conducted a focus group study with 8 groups of participants (N = 32). Our results suggest that factors influencing privacy trade-offs go beyond existing TA factors alone. A technology's perceived usefulness plays an important role, as well as dimensions related to context, previous experiences, perceived autonomy and the feeling of control over the data being shared

Lab Testing Beyond Usability: Challenges and Recommendations for Assessing User Experiences

In the “third wave” of human-computer interaction (HCI), the advent of the conceptual approach of UX broadens and changes the HCI landscape. Methods approved before, mainly within the conceptual approach of usability, are still widely used, and yet their adequacy for UX evaluation remains uncertain in many applications. Laboratory testing is undoubtedly the most prominent example of such a method. Hence, in this study, we investigated how the more comprehensive and emotional scope of UX can be assessed by laboratory testing. In this paper, we report on a use case study involving 70 participants. They first took part in user/laboratory tests and then were asked to evaluate their experience with the two systems (perceived UX) by filling out an AttrakDiff scale and a UX needs fulfillment questionnaire. We conducted post-test interviews to better understand participants’ experiences. We analyzed how the participants’ perceived UX depends on quantitative (e.g., task completion time, task sequence, level of familiarity with the system) and qualitative aspects (think aloud, debriefing interviews) within the laboratory context. Results indicate that the laboratory setting has a strong impact on the participants’ perceived UX, and support a discussion of the quality and limitations of laboratory evaluations regarding UX assessment. In this paper, we have identified concrete challenges and have provided solutions and tips useful for both practitioners and researchers who seek to account for the subjective, situated, and temporal nature of the UX in their assessments