Enhancing decision-making in user-centered web development: a methodology for card-sorting analysis

The World Wide Web has become a common platform for interactive software development. Most web applications feature custom user interfaces used by millions of people every day. Information architecture addresses the structural design of information to build quality web applications with improved usability of content, navigation, and findability. One of the most frequently utilized information architecture methods is card sorting—an affordable, user-centered approach for eliciting and evaluating categories and navigable items. Card sorting facilitates decision-making during the development process based on users’ mental models of a given application domain. However, although the qualitative analysis of card sorts has become common practice in information architecture, the quantitative analysis of card sorting is less widely applied. The reason for this gap is that quantitative analysis often requires the use of customized techniques to extract meaningful information for decision-making. To facilitate this process and support the structuring of information, we propose a methodology for the quantitative analysis of card-sorting results in this paper. The suggested approach can be systematically applied to provide clues and support for decisions. These might significantly impact the design and, thus, the final quality of the web application. Therefore, the approach includes proper goodness values that enable comparisons among the results of the methods and techniques used and ensure the suitability of the analyses performed. Two publicly available datasets were used to demonstrate the key issues related to the interpretation of card sorting results and the overall suitability and validity of the proposed methodologyThis work was partially supported by the Spanish Government [grant number RTI2018-095255-B-I00]; and the Madrid Research Council [Grant Number P2018/TCS-4314

Facilitator, Functionary, Friend or Foe? Studying the Role of iPads within Learning Activities Across a School Year

We present the findings from a longitudinal study of iPad use in a Primary school classroom. While tablet devices have found their way into classroom environments, we still lack in depth and long-term studies of how they integrate into everyday classroom activities. Our findings illustrate in-classroom tablet use and the broad range of learning activities in subjects such as maths, languages, social sciences, and even physical education. Our observations expand current models on teaching and learning supported by tablet technology. Our findings are child-centred, focusing on three different roles that tablets can play as part of learning activities: Friend, Functionary, and Facilitator. This new perspective on in-classroom tablet use can facilitate critical discussions around the integration and impact of these devices in the educational context, from a design and educational point of view

HCI and Design Thinking: Effects on Innovation in the Academic Library

This paper is concerned with how two design processes that are seemingly very similar, human-computer interaction design and design thinking, affect innovation in the context of an academic library. Twenty different multidisciplinary projects involving advanced students of interaction design, researchers and library employees, using either of these two approaches or their combination, were conducted during the past four years. We chose two projects that we consider as illustrative of overall findings, in particular, regarding outcomes for diverse stakeholders. Both projects were focusing on the same problem, which many academic (and public) libraries face, of accessing library’s e-book collections and making doing so more enjoyable. IADIS – International Association for Development of the Information Society http://www.iadis.or

Nurturing creativity. Assemblages in HCI Design Practices

This paper investigates the emergence and nourishment of group creativity within humancomputer interaction design (HCID). HCID practitioners are groomed within a scientific tradition and primarily perceive themselves as knowledge seekers, rather than creative makers of things. In an effort to add new value to HCID we refer to ‘assemblage of skills’ and ‘assemblage of design practices’ suggesting that practitioners acquire creativity when combining epistemology (finder) and ontology (maker). We do so by example from an advanced graduate course in HCID where the students were to design products to be exhibited in a well-visited and established annual fair at the university. This task required the presence of skills and practices of both ‘finder’ and ‘maker’. In the process of product making, the students were not allowed to rely exclusively on learned methods and approaches involving users and other stakeholders. Rather, they were to unleash their own creativity. The paper follows this process of emerging creativity through photo documentation, it provides lessons learned, and it discusses how design comes about through a relationship between finding and making. Pages 1204-1217 in Proceedings of DRS 2014 Conference. Umeå, Sweden, June 16-19

Openness and design Practices in Academic Libraries

This paper explores openness and its role and relevance in creating an opportunity for sustained innovation through design thinking in organizations such as libraries. There is a growing recognition of design thinking as an effective approach to innovation. Many libraries, also academic ones, seem to have embraced the approach. However, to enable sustained, and not only short-term efforts to innovate, we believe that design thinking needs to be integrated with existing library practices. Furthermore, we consider that openness towards designerly ways of working is crucial in achieving that goal. In this paper, we discuss diverse ways in which openness plays a role in design thinking led innovation, including openness to learning new skills, question and explore, acquire new values, and continually integrate what is learned with existing practices. Two cases from our research on effects of design thinking on academic library practices are used to illustrate the importance of openness in this process

When Designers are Non-designers: Open Endedness vs. Structure of Design Tools

In this paper, we explore types of toolsets that are suitable for design thinking processes, when design teams consist of non-designers. We have conducted a series of workshops to experiment with open-ended, semi-structured and structured tools, using design thinking for libraries as a research case. Our results clearly indicate that semi-structured tools fare best regarding variety of outputs, breadth of ideas and engagement of participants