Throughout the mechanical design process, designers, the majority of whom are men, often fail to consider the needs of women, resulting in consequences ranging from inconvenience to increased risk of serious injury or death. Although these biases are well studied in other fields of research, the mechanical design field lacks formal investigation into this phenomenon. In this study, engineering students (n = 301) took a survey in which they read a Persona describing a student makerspace user and a Walkthrough describing the user’s interaction with the makerspace while completing a project. During the Walkthrough, the user encountered various obstacles or Pain Points. Participants were asked to recall and evaluate the Pain Points that the user encountered and then evaluated their perceptions of the makerspace and user. The independent variables under investigation were the gender of the user Persona (woman, gender-neutral, or man), the Walkthrough room case (crafting or woodworking makerspace), and the modality of the Persona and Walkthrough (text- or audio-based). Results showed that participants from the Text-based modality were better able to recall Pain Points compared to participants from the Audio-based modality. Pain Points were assessed as more severe when they impacted women users, potentially stemming from protective paternalism. In addition to finding that the gender of a user impacted the way a task environment was perceived, results confirmed the presence of androcentrism, or “default man” assumptions, in the way designers view end users of unknown gender. Promisingly, providing user Persona information in an audio modality significantly reduced this bias compared to text-based modalities, indicating that providing richer detail in user personas has the capability to reduce gender bias in designers.
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A Data Analytics Approach to Persona Development for The Future Mobile Office
The concept of using automated vehicles as mobile workspaces is now emerging. Consequently, the in- vehicle environment of automated vehicles must be redesigned to support user interactions in performing work-related tasks. During the design phase, interaction designers often use personas to understand target user groups. Personas are representations of prototypical users and are constructed from user surveys and interview data. Although data-driven, large samples of user data are typically assessed qualitatively and may result in personas that are not representative of target user groups. To create representative personas, this paper demonstrates a data analytics approach to persona development for future mobile workspaces using data from the occupational information network (O*NET). O*NET consists of data on 968 occupations, each defined by 277 features. The data were reduced using dimensionality reduction and 7 personas were identified using cluster analysis. Finally, the important features of each persona were identified using logistic regression.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1839484
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10317865
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting
- Volume:
- 64
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2169-5067
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1071181320641240
