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1. Using Personas with Visual Impairments to Explore the Design of an Accessible Self-Driving Vehicle Human-Machine Interface

   Brinkley, J. (January 2021, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting)

   Recent reports have suggested that most self-driving vehicle technology being developed is not currently accessible to users with disabilities. We purport that this problem may be at least partially attributable to knowledge gaps in practice-oriented user-centered design research. Missing, we argue, are studies that demonstrate the practical application of user-centered design methodologies in capturing the needs of users with disabilities in the design of automotive systems specifically. We have investigated user-centered design, specifically the use of personas, as a methodological tool to inform the design of a self-driving vehicle human-machine interface for blind and low vision users. We then explore the use of these derived personas in a series of participatory design sessions involving visually impaired co-designers. Our findings suggest that a robust, multi-method UCD process culminating with persona development may be effective in capturing the conceptual model of persons with disabilities and informing the design of automotive system. 

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2. Applying Phenomenography to Develop a Comprehensive Understanding of Ethics in Engineering Practice

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2018.8658475  

   Brightman, Andrew O.; Fila, Nichoals D.; Hess, Justin L.; Kerr, Alison J.; Kim, Dayoung; Loui, Michael C.; Zoltowski, Carla B. (October 2018, Frontiers in education)

   This Work-in-Progress Research paper describes (1) the contemporary research space on ethics education in engineering; (2) our long-term research plan; (3) the theoretical underpinnings of Phase 1 of our research plan (phenomenography); and (4) the design and developmental process of a phenomenographic interview protocol to explore engineers’ experiences with ethics. Ethical behavior is a complex phenomenon that is complicated by the institutional and cultural contexts in which it occurs. Engineers also have varied roles and often work in a myriad of capacities that influence their experiences with and understanding of ethics in practice. We are using phenomenography, a qualitative research approach, to explore and categorize the ways engineers experience and understand ethical engineering practice. Specifically, phenomenography will allow us to systematically investigate the range and complexity of ways that engineers experience ethics in professional practice in the health products industry. Phenomenographic data will be obtained through a specialized type of semi-structured interview. Here we introduce the design of our interview protocol and its four sections: Background, Experience, Conceptual, and Summative. We also describe our iterative process for framing questions throughout each section. 

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3. The Personification of Big Data

   https://doi.org/10.1017/dsi.2019.409  

   Stevenson, Phillip Douglas; Mattson, Christopher Andrew (July 2019, Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design)

   Abstract Organizations all over the world, both national and international, gather demographic data so that the progress of nations and peoples can be tracked. This data is often made available to the public in the form of aggregated national level data or individual responses (microdata). Product designers likewise conduct surveys to better understand their customer and create personas. Personas are archetypes of the individuals who will use, maintain, sell or otherwise be affected by the products created by designers. Personas help designers better understand the person the product is designed for. Unfortunately, the process of collecting customer information and creating personas is often a slow and expensive process. In this paper, we introduce a new method of creating personas, leveraging publicly available databanks of both aggregated national level and information on individuals in the population. A computational persona generator is introduced that creates a population of personas that mirrors a real population in terms of size and statistics. Realistic individual personas are filtered from this population for use in product development. 

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4. User-centered personas for PhysPort

   https://doi.org/10.1119/perc.2019.pr.Madsen  

   Madsen, Adrian M.; McKagan, Sarah B.; Strubbe, Linda E.; Sayre, Eleanor C.; Zohrabi Alaee, Dina; Huynh, Tra (January 2020, Proceedings of the Physics Education Research Conference 2019)

   null (Ed.)

   PhysPort is a professional development website for physics faculty to develop their teaching through research-based resources. As part of PhysPort's ongoing research efforts, we conducted interviews with 23 physics faculty from diverse instructional and institutional contexts in the US. From our interviews, we sought common experiences, motivations, and pain points to develop personas--person-like constructs--of physics faculty in the US. Our research focuses on the perspectives of the key users of our site, and thus we take a user-centered perspective rather than a researcher-centered perspective. We developed personas, which are person-like constructs that are developed based on salient characteristics of actual users, that enable designers to create resources to meet actual user needs without designing for the idiosyncrasies of specific users. We present our set of six personas of physics faculty members: a faculty member who is new to improving his teaching; one who takes up his department's practices; one who wants her teaching to feel good; one who is comfortable in her teaching; one who is continuously improving; and one who solves big problems in her department. These personas of physics faculty making changes to their teaching can be used more broadly to improve the design and development of professional development resources and activities for physics faculty. 

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5. Work In Progress: Considering the Impact on Research Quality of a Team Approach to Phenomenography

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--33601  

   Fila, Nicholas D.; Zoltowski, Carla B.; Hess, Justin L.; Kim, Dayoung; Kerr, Alison J.; Brightman, Andrew O.; Loui, Michael (July 2019, Work In Progress: Considering the Impact on Research Quality of a Team Approach to Phenomenography)

   This WIP paper describes a team approach to phenomenography on ethical engineering practice in the health products industry and its potential impact on research quality. Although qualitative researchers often conduct phenomenography collaboratively, most often a single individual leads the data collection and analysis; others primarily serve as critical reviewers. However, quality may be enhanced by involving collaborators as data analysts in “sustained cycles of scrutiny, debate and testing against the data” [1, p. 88], thus interweaving unique perspectives and insights throughout the analysis process. Nonetheless, collaborating in this intensive data analysis process also presents unique challenges. In this paper, we (1) describe the processes we are applying in an integrated team-based phenomenographic study, (2) identify how the team approach affects research quality, and (3) reflect on the challenges inherent to this process. We ground this reflective case study in the methodological literature on phenomenography. Our team strategies include multiple interviewers (and, when possible, two interviewers per inter-view), team communication through reflective memos, and integration of individual and team-based data analysis with peer critique of individual analyses. We compare our team approach with typical individual phenomenographic approaches, and we align our procedures with the five strategies of the Qualifying Qualitative Research Quality Framework, or Q3, designed by Walther, Sochacka, and Kellam [2]. In aligning strategies, we consider benefits and trade-offs. 

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