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1. Thinking Beyond the Default User: The Impact of Gender, Stereotypes, and Modality on Interpretation of User Needs

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4064263  

   Schauer, Anastasia M; Schaufel, Hunter; Nunn, Margaret; Kohls, Noah D; Fu, Katherine (May 2024, Journal of Mechanical Design)

   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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2. Keeping Designers in the Loop: Communicating Inherent Algorithmic Trade-offs Across Multiple Objectives

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395528  

   Yu, Bowen; Yuan, Ye; Terveen, Loren; Wu, Zhiwei Steven; Forlizzi, Jodi; Zhu, Haiyi (July 2020, Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference)

   Artificial intelligence algorithms have been used to enhance a wide variety of products and services, including assisting human decision making in high-stake contexts. However, these algorithms are complex and have trade-offs, notably between prediction accuracy and fairness to population subgroups. This makes it hard for designers to understand algorithms and design products or services in a way that respects users' goals, values, and needs. We proposed a method to help designers and users explore algorithms, visualize their trade-offs, and select algorithms with trade-offs consistent with their goals and needs. We evaluated our method on the problem of predicting criminal defendants' likelihood to re-offend through (i) a large-scale Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment, and (ii) in-depth interviews with domain experts. Our evaluations show that our method can help designers and users of these systems better understand and navigate algorithmic trade-offs. This paper contributes a new way of providing designers the ability to understand and control the outcomes of algorithmic systems they are creating. 

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3. Enabling Data-Driven API Design with Community Usage Data: A Need-Finding Study

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376382  

   Zhang, Tianyi; Hartmann, Björn; Kim, Miryung; Glassman, Elena L. (April 2020, CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   APIs are becoming the fundamental building block of modern software and their usability is crucial to programming efficiency and software quality. Yet API designers find it hard to gather and interpret user feedback on their APIs. To close the gap, we interviewed 23 API designers from 6 companies and 11 open-source projects to understand their practices and needs. The primary way of gathering user feedback is through bug reports and peer reviews, as formal usability testing is prohibitively expensive to conduct in practice. Participants expressed a strong desire to gather real-world use cases and understand users' mental models, but there was a lack of tool support for such needs. In particular, participants were curious about where users got stuck, their workarounds, common mistakes, and unanticipated corner cases. We highlight several opportunities to address those unmet needs, including developing new mechanisms that systematically elicit users' mental models, building mining frameworks that identify recurring patterns beyond shallow statistics about API usage, and exploring alternative design choices made in similar libraries. 

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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. Women and URM Experiences in Makerspaces

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--57467  

   De_Rosa, Alexander; Buckley, Jenni; Trauth, Amy (June 2025, ASEE Conferences)

   Academic makerspaces represent an ideal opportunity to present engineering students with active, experiential learning opportunities that reinforce theoretical concepts through conceptual design and prototyping. When appropriately supported, experiential learning in makerspaces has the capacity to drive development of technical skills and positive self-efficacy among novice engineers. However, research suggests that students who identify as part of historically underrepresented groups (i.e. those who are not White and male) can experience makerspaces in ways that marginalize their success. Thus, care must be taken in makerspace design and operation to create an environment that has a positive impact on the success of all students. In this study, we consider the perceptions and experiences of women and underrepresented racial/ethnic minorities (URMs) in an academic makerspace at one large, research intensive institution. We surveyed 256 undergraduate mechanical engineering students to compare and contrast their self-efficacy, their perceptions of makerspace support, and their peer-to-peer interactions. We found that student self-efficacy for conceptual design and prototyping did not differ by race or gender. However, females reported they were more likely to have a positive experience in the makerspace when supported by a teaching assistant who was also female. Students who identified as URM were significantly more likely to report discomfort in working with peers in the makerspace. We anticipate the outcomes of this study will provide implications for faculty and staff makerspaces at other postsecondary institutions who aim to build an inclusive and accessible learning environment for all students. 

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