Capturing the Practices, Challenges, and Needs of Transportation Decision-Makers

Transportation decision-makers from government agencies play an important role in addressing the traffic network conditions, which in turn, have a major impact on the well-being of citizens. The practices, challenges, and needs of this group of practitioners are less represented in the HCI literature. We address this gap through an interview study with 19 practitioners from Transports Qu\'ebec, a government agency responsible for transportation infrastructures in Qu\'ebec, Canada. We found that this group of decision-makers can most benefit from research about data analysis tools and platforms that (1) provide information to support data quality awareness, (2) are interoperable with other tools in the complex workflow of the practitioners, and (3) support intuitive and customizable visual analytics. These implications can also be informative to the design of tools supporting other decision-making tasks and domains.Comment: 7 pages, 0 figures, ACM CHI LBW Paper (2020). For personas created in the project, see https://github.com/HCDLab/TDMPersona