Hi there! I'm very excited to share the
work that I've done with my incredible
collaborators at the University of
Washington on opportunities and
challenges involving users in
project-based HCI education. So some of
you might use Alan Dix at al.'s
famous human-computer interaction
textbook where they highlight that the
core of interaction design is putting
the user first, keeping the user in the
center, and remembering the user at the
end. And we also know that there exists
many methods for involving users such as
Nielsen group's famous chart of
different methods that you can use when
engaging users in your research projects.
And also we know there are many models
of design that overview the process of
involving users. Nut we asked in this
work, How do, and should, HCI educators
prepare students to work with users. We
found that in a review of the literature
on human-computer interaction and design
there are few that closely examine
engagements between designers and users
in courses. But we know that involving
users in student design projects in
courses is common. This picture is a
picture of my senior capstone when I was
an undergraduate student where we worked
with two clients that had a prior
relationship with our university but
then I was able to work with them and
design a well plate assembly for them
with my teammates. But as I just
mentioned in my example, often students
select users with convenience sampling
and this is a problem for HCI education
to really consider, and reflect on, which
users we involved in our courses and how
HCI students are learning to work with a
broad range of users. At the same time we
know that there are challenges to
working with end users in courses
students may face anxiety working with
users they don't have a prior
relationship with. Establish connections
between students educators and users
takes time and intentionality. And we
have to be conscious of the burden that
it might place on users to be involved
throughout the design process. For this
work we partnered a master student HCI
studio prototyping course with a
children's co-design team and this is
one look into what that experience was
like.
So in that video clip you see the
children opening up a box that the
design students put together and they
open it up and they talk about the
different pieces and parts that they like
of that prototype. And specifically in
this work, we ask How do HCI students
engage with users unlike themselves
during their design process? And what
value do they perceive in working with
users different from themselves in their
design and reflection process? To give
you some context on the course it is an
HCI course that is within a one-year
design master's program it is studio based,
cross-disciplinary and focuses on
teaching HCI and interaction design
courses. And the co design team that we
partnered with is an existing
intergenerational design team called
KidsTeam UW where children
undergraduates and adults come together
to form this design team and give
different ideas. And for the course the
design challenge was for the HCI
students to co-design a stem learning
experience for youth with KidsTeam UW.
And this is an overview of the co-
design process that we followed today
I'll focus more on the design time but I
encourage you to read Yip at al.'s
2017 CHI paper to understand more of
the co-design process that we went
through. In session 1, it took place weeks
3 & 4 of the quarter and it was the
first time that the HCI students had met
at the children and each
design team had a station in which
children rotated in pairs for 10 minutes.
Each session 2 took place week 7 and 8
of the quarter and at this point
each HCI students had iterated on their
prototypes with course instructors and
peers. and they were close to their final
deliverables which included an
interactive hardware prototype, a video,
and a lesson plan to go along with the
prototype. Our methods included video
analysis we audio and video
record all of the co-design sessions and
there were eight co-design sessions. And
each session lasted 90 minutes and so we
had 720 minutes of video data. We also
conducted follow-up interviews with the
HCI students after the course had ended
and out of the 34 enrolled students in
the class, we interviewed 14 of those 34.
They were each representative of one
team within the the whole course and we
asked some questions about the co-design
experience. And we also gave them a video
probe. We showed them a one to two minute
clip of their interaction with the
children and then asked them some
questions about what was happening in
that video clip.
And finally we triangulated our methods
with artifact analysis after the course
ended we asked students if they felt
comfortable sharing with us their design
documentation, their final artifacts,
pictures of their thought process. And we
analyzed, we triangulated our methods, by
analyzing these artifacts. And so today
I'm going to talk about three findings. I
encourage you to look at our paper in
detail for details on these findings but
I'm gonna highlight a little bit of each
three of them. So to start with
communicating with users in the paper, we
highlight two sub themes of building
rapport and session management. So with
respect to building rapport Nina says it
perfectly. "We had two individual sessions
it's really hard to build a rapport with
them." And we recognized this before we
knew that it was a challenge to both get
to know your user and also get them to
build the rapport with them to
contribute to your design ideas and for
that reason in the co-design process we
have time for snack time and circle time
before we get to the actual design time.
But we found that as you see in this
picture design students self segregated
and the children also self separated so
they weren't using that time to build
those connections and we saw as I
mentioned the self-segregation also
during snack time we saw that some
people felt uncomfortable sharing
personal details to everyone that they
didn't know about their name their age
and kind of the "question of the day" that
we asked. And then we also recognized
that it was a limited time and number of
sessions but we were working within the
constraints of a course. But what we also
saw successful strategies that the HCI
students employed to overcome these
challenges. And that included adapting
their language to mimic the children or
to meet where they were talking what
using welcoming body expressions,
dynamically changing between activities
and demonstrating empathy with the
children whether they couldn't figure
out the prototype where they were trying
to contribute their ideas and couldn't
communicate them as well and
with adapting language. Here I'll
highlight a quick video which shows how
the design students which are in circles
responded dynamically and adapted their
language to the children which are
pointed to in arrows. So in this clip what
you see is they're all designing ideas
for a robot and they're trying to figure
out, what should the robot do, what do we
want it to be and the children are
talking about poop and rapping and the
design students are going along with
their ideas and responding but also
bringing back the conversation to ok
what does this mean for the design and
the robot that we're working on together
here. And with respect to session
management we saw that the design
students were going in to give their
ideas but we're challenged by receiving
unexpected feedback by figuring out how
to respond to the children. So here I
encourage you to read our paper to
understand more about the session
management finding. With respect to
complex power dynamics we found
that not only were there power dynamics
between designers and users but also
between designers and other adults in
this course. And we looked at those
nuances and interactions between the
designers and the other stakeholders
whether they were the children from the
users or other adults so beyond this. And
her follow-up interview Biya talked about "in
China we have this really stretched
culture where you need to respect the
elders the teachers especially when
you're at a young age the teacher has
higher authority and I know that's so
different from the Western world I find
that to be fascinating." And here Biya is
talking about how when they went to the
co-design sessions where we strive for
the principle of equal partnerships for
children and designers for everyone to
contribute their ideas that there was
this time came in the back of her mind
trying to figure out we are authoritative
to the children or how much do we
navigate like letting them contribute
ideas but also they are children, we are adults
adults. And we found that many students
relied on their prior experiences with
children and brought those to this
experience.
Whether it was camp experience that they
had learning how to work with children
or whether it was prior experiences of
their expectation of what it was like to
be a child.
We also found power dynamics at
play between designers and users when
engaging multiple users and so in this
screenshot what you see is two children
because they were rotating in pairs to
each station are looking at each other's
prototypes. One prototype has a
catalyst which is gonna grow and the
other one doesn't. And so the child in
green is the one that doesn't have the
catalyst and in the video we see him go
"wah" because his isn't as exciting as
the other child's. And so there might have
been some differences in the children's
experiences based on how the design
students set up the co design session's
design time. And finally we found that
they navigated positioning the
children's input among other
stakeholders input. So Toby here says
"Sometimes I think that even though the
kids are really excited about something
then I have to think about the
feasibility of it too like they're
interested but is it educational for
them." And then the sub theme that we had
out with designers and other adults
was mainly with the facilitator of KidsTeam UW
as the design students were
trying to navigate how much agency they
had over the design time. In our
paper we discussed how with any user
partnership in courses there will be a
facilitator whether it's older adults or
whether it's a Latino community user
group and so we we have to try to figure
out as educators how we support HCI
students in navigating these power
dynamics between themselves and users,
but also between themselves and other
adults. And for our third finding we highlight
the perceived values through
reflection that we saw in the use of our
video probes and our follow up
interviews. And in our paper we talked
about the role of navigating complexity
in this experience and naming
opportunities. That students named
opportunities for future improvement as
designers. And also the the difference
between remembering and interaction and
noticing the interaction after watching
their video clips. So with respect to
navigating complexity one student
Abigail talked about how this experience
showed her the "value
being flexible I need to work on my feet
and be adaptable develop more flexible
study guides or like learning how to
extrapolate data I didn't intend to
receive. These are all valuable things
they're just not traditional academic
definitions of education it was more
experiential." And with respect to naming
and remembering, I encourage you to look
at the paper as we highlight different
things that we can do to support HCI
students in not only having these
complex experiences in the classroom but
also making sense of them through
reflection and through video probes.
So now I'll touch on implications for
what this means for the CHI community and
our paper discusses encouraging design
complexity between HCI students and end
users. And in this design complexity
making sure that it's within a safe
environment where students, HCI students,
can figure out and navigate how to
become better designers, there's also
facilitators, and there's also different
users that are involved in this process.
So in a safe but complex space. And we
found that through these follow-up
interviews and this pedagogical practice
of reflections HCI students were able to
consider how to best strategize and work
with users that were different from
themselves with respect to ethnic and
social identities, in this case the
children. And we think that HCI educators
can support this by anticipating the
challenge we uncover in our paper and
also developing pedagogical ways to
prepare designers through role-playing
or reading case studies. Second we
recommend drawing on reflective
practices in HCI pedagogy and
education. And so in this case we really
found that our video clips can be a
really important pedagogical tool that
can be used more frequently in HCI for
students to look at those video clips
and not only review their study sessions,
but go more in depth about the complex
nature of their interactions with their
users. But they might not remember just
by trying to think back to what happened
but actually watching the interaction
and then discussing the interaction
with the users. And so we propose
creating a repository of case studies to
reflect on difficult interactions
between designers and users and creating
a video club so that HCI students,
designers that are looking to improve
their practice with users, can think and
reflect on their engagement with users.
We are currently in year two of the
future work of this research and
we're implementing a lot of our key
takeaways from year 1 into year 2 to see
how we can best support HCI students as they're
navigating this complex environment and
earning and figuring out how to engage
these children's users in their design
process within the constraints of a
course. I want to thank all of my
collaborators our undergraduate and
graduate researchers and the National
Science Foundation for their support. And
with that I would love if you reached
out with questions after you watch this
video and read our paper and see if
there's anything I can help answer
clarify or if you have ideas about our
work. Thank you!