New Approach to Teaching User Experience Design Skills Wins Award
A team of researchers at the Kahlert School of Computing has won a best paper honorable mention award for their paper describing a new approach to teaching students about design empathy in the classroom. The award-winning paper will be presented at the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2024 conference taking place this week in Copenhagen, Denmark.
When software companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft create or improve applications they start by doing lots of work to better understand their users. User experience researchers collect data: they observe, interview, survey, and study potential users so that they can understand how the software might fit into their lives, also known as developing “design empathy” for those potential users. Having design empathy is valuable even to other people on the software teams who are not designers – software engineers and project managers make better software when they understand more about who is using it and how it will be used.
This is even more crucial when people are creating software for people whose lives are very different from their own: for example, when someone who does not have a disability is designing software that will be used by people who do have disabilities, as is often the case. However, teaching students about design empathy is a difficult challenge for professors: collecting this data is itself a skill, and it requires the participation of other third parties to serve as “the users.” Again, when working with a population of users with disabilities, this can be a particular challenge.
Newly graduated doctoral students Tamanna Motahar and Noelle Brown, along with their advisors Professors Eliane Stampfer Wiese and Jason Wiese, developed a new approach to more effectively teach design empathy in the classroom. The approach leverages the fact that many people post publicly about their experiences on social media platforms such as Reddit. The team first collected some of these posts for a particular user community: people who have had a spinal cord injury. They categorized each post based on its subject, and then used those categories to guide the creation of fictional design scenarios: going to the grocery store, going on vacation, returning to school after an injury, and handling air travel.
They then selected some of the posts, paraphrased or changed their wording to protect the identity and privacy of the original poster, and curated the posts into a reading assignment that would accompany each scenario. Finally, they wrote a multi-part assignment around these scenarios and posts. In part 1, students are each assigned to think through one of the design scenarios using a series of questions to prompt their thinking. Part 2 involves reading the curated and paraphrased posts, described above. In part 3 the students come together in class with groups of 3-4 students who were assigned different scenarios to discuss their thoughts after reading the posts. In part 4, the students revisit their individual design scenarios from part 1 to see if they would add or change anything.
To test the idea, the team deployed the project in a small class that Professor Jason Wiese was teaching. “What we saw was that despite the students providing thoughtful responses to the design prompt in part 1, their in-class conversations and final responses in part 4 showed that their perspective really shifted and they considered the impact of many more real-world factors after reading the posts,” said Motahar, the lead author of the paper.
The research team plans to further refine the assignment and to work towards sharing the assignment materials more broadly, so that other teachers can use them to teach students about developing design empathy. One important consideration in this work, and especially about sharing the assignment materials, is about the ethical implications of using social media posts for a purpose other than what was originally intended by the poster, and also to protect the privacy of those posters. The research team followed broadly agreed upon best practices for working with such social media data, including removing any identifiers - including usernames or locations - and changing the words of the posts before using them while still preserving the meaning of the original post.
The full paper is available online: Tamanna Motahar, Noelle Brown, Eliane Stampfer Wiese, and Jason Wiese. Toward Building Design Empathy for People with Disabilities Using Social Media Data: A New Approach for Novice Designers. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '24). https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660687
Kahlert School of Computing Faculty and Students to Present at CHI 2024 in Honolulu
The Kahlert School of Computing is gearing up for the CHI 2024 conference on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi from May 11-16th. Regarded as the premier global event for Human-Computer Interaction, the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems unites industry and academic experts to explore avenues for advancing and refining cutting-edge technologies.
The Kahlert School of Computing is proud to be represented by several students and faculty members presenting research at the conference, including: PhD students Joshua Dawson, Eden Fisher, Maxim Lisnic, and faculty members Paul Rosen, Alexander Lex, Marina Kogan, and Jason Wiese.
The works that will be presented by Kahlert School of Computing faculty and students are:
Hospital Employee Experiences Caring for Patients in Smart Patient Rooms
Authors: Joshua Dawson, Eden Fisher, Jason Wiese
This work sheds light on Hospital employees’ current use of smart Hospital room technology with thematic analysis of interviews, highlighting benefits, drawbacks, and potential areas for improvement.
"Yeah, this graph doesn't show that": Analysis of Online Engagement with Misleading Data Visualizations
Authors: Maxim Lisnic, Alexander Lex, Marina Kogan
This investigation analyzes the public's engagement with data visualization posts about COVID-19 on Twitter, discussing opportunities and limitations to effectively leveraging crowdsourced assessments to address data-driven misinformation.
Do You See What I See? A Qualitative Study Eliciting High-Level Visualiz ation Comprehension
Authors: Paul Rosen, Ghulam Jilani Quadri (University of North Carolina), Zhehao Wang (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Arran Zeyu Wang (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), Jennifer Adorno (University of South Florida), Danielle Albers Szafir (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)
This work explores how viewers interpret visualizations in alignment with designers' communicative goals, contrasting with traditional studies focused on isolated tasks. It contains an investigation into the natural comprehension of high-level patterns in visualizations, revealing discrepancies between stated objectives and audience understanding across different chart types.
In addition, Kahlert School of Computing Associate Professor, Katherine E Isaacs will be one of the chairs for the workshop Human-Notebook Interactions: The CHI of Computational Notebooks. The workshop aims to unite researchers from the CHI community to foster collaboration at the intersection of computational notebook and HCI research, focusing on the effective design and use of interfaces within computational notebook environments.
Blair Sullivan Honored by Georgia Tech
Celebrating Georgia Tech Women: Pathway of Progress is the new name of the forthcoming, permanent tribute to the impact of women from Georgia Tech, now under construction near the John Lewis Student Center and Stamps Commons. Set to open in Fall 2024, the physical installation and accompanying digital experience will celebrate 70 graduates, as well as 98 women and events with historical significance to the Institute.
Apply For SEEDS 2024
We would like to introduce SEEDS, A 10 weeklong, summer mobile app development challenge, where you will work in a team with 3 other girls of your age. We use the Design Thinking framework along with live iOS and Android coaching sessions to help you create socially useful apps from your own ideas. This program is offered by Dandilyonn, a non-profit which is working hard to increase the representation of women in the computer software development industry. We are a group of women who work for Silicon Valley companies Amazon, Google, Adobe. All passionate about sharing our experiences with young girls like you and making you ready for tech careers.
Here are few unique aspects and their benefits of SEEDS
- End to end design thinking based app development training taught by professionals who learned the art of Stanford LEAD program.
- End to end iOS or Android app development training coached by practicing industry software developers
- You own what you build! You are completely free to continue to develop the app in future and make a mark.
- A chance at winning hundreds of dollars as winning team at the end of the summer program
- Irreplaceable real life app development experience to boost your resume and chances of landing tech internships in leading development companies.
- Fellow students, industry practitioners, industry leaders network connections through weekly training, women in tech presentations and panels
- Follow-up opportunities to work on mock interviews and internship opportunities
- Above all, a fulfilling experience of using your talent to make a difference!
We have run the SEEDS program for the past 4 years with over 100+ successful participation from universities all over the US. We welcome girls from community colleges to Ivy Leagues and give everyone equal opportunity to participate. Our students have found SEEDS training and experience – confidence building, which have led them to find prestigious internship opportunities in companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft to name a few. We have invited over 20+ women in tech presenters who have connected with our students directly. They have come from many different roles in tech from VP of marketing at Amazon Music to UX designer at Google.
This year we want to go big!! We are super excited to kick off 2023 SEEDS application season. This summer, we want to enroll up to 80 female students (including those who identify themselves of female gender) with a 10% goal for BLNA enrollment.
We invite all eligible students at University of Utah to apply for SEEDS NOW!! Do not wait. In the past, we have reached our limit of 40 enrollment within 2 days. If you would like to team with your girl friends from college or school, forward the application link to them. Each participant will need to apply separately.
Please do note that there is a small application fee to make sure only interested girls apply, once selected the program is offered with no cost to the student.
Hope to hear back from many of you and best of luck for your upcoming careers in tech.
Regards
Archana Chaudhary
Director: SEEDS
Grad Visit Weekend
Sign up for volunteer opportunities to get involved in the Grad Visit Weekend here!
WTC 3x3 at University of Utah
The 3×3 is a unique networking event where attendees have more
personal interactions and mentorship from workforce leaders in STEM
fields.
Adobe Internship Talk
Archana Choudhary - Senior Engineering Manager at Adobe | "Decoding the CS Internship Experience: Unveiling Diverse Roles for Computer Science Students"
UCIC Ambassador Ashley Lujan Wins Women Tech Council Student Pathway Award
Congratulations to our very own UCIC Ambassador, Ashley Lujan, for winning the Women Tech Council Student Pathway Award!
The Women Tech Awards is the premier awards program for women in technology with ties to Silicon Slopes, and has recognized some of the most prestigious and and up-and-coming women throughout the technology industry. By bringing visibility to the women who are creating new technologies, leading technology companies, driving innovation and inspiring the tech community, these awards accelerate their career trajectories, elevate the entire technology sector, and help inspire thousands of high school girls and other women into STEM careers.