Advancements in personal fabrication technologies (e.g. 3D printing) resulted in a rising interest in 'do-it-yourself assistive technology' (DIY AT). Clinical knowledge is considered fundamental for DIY AT design, but research into making DIY AT by clinicians is limited. In this paper, we explore occupational therapists' attitudes towards 3D printing both before and after gaining hands-on experience with 3D modelling software. In addition, as clinicians indicate to prefer collaborations with experienced designers, we organized a codesign study with occupational therapists and professional designers to conceptualize a feasible collaborative DIY-AT design process. The results of our studies show an overall enthusiasm of occupational therapists towards 3D printing, but the perceived impact of 3D printing on their job performance decreased after gaining hands-on experience. Collaborating with designers seems a viable way forward. We propose a model for a collaborative design process, highlighting different phases and the roles that occupational therapists and designers play.

Health self-management technology has the potential to significantly improve the Quality of Life of patients suffering from chronic diseases. However, designing the technology involves numerous highly context-dependent design decisions. In this paper, we analyse a case study of self-monitoring technology in the field of congestive heart failure. We analyse the design process of the technology from the perspective of design trade-offs. Three important trade-offs related to health self-monitoring technology are described in detail, related to patient autonomy, technology appropriation, and patient well-being. For each of the trade-offs, various mediating factors that influence design decisions are described in detail. On a practical level, this analysis can inform future developments in self-management technology. In addition, this design trade-off analysis provides intermediary knowledge that can contribute to a better theoretical understanding of health self-management technology.

This paper reports on a study to understand the effects the MemoLine visualization tool has on the interview process for evaluating long term user experience with children. Modifications were made to the MemoLine to try to improve consistency in reporting periods of no play. A within-subject design study was conducted using the MemoLine with interviews, and just interviews, of a suite of educational games over a 12-week period. The participants were 22 children, aged between 8 and 9 years, from a UK primary school. Three constructs were analyzed: Game Play, Learning and Ease of Use. The results showed that using the MemoLine's visualization tool did not aid the children to recall past experience in comparison to just conducting an interview. In addition, the changes to the tool did not appear to aid consistency when reporting periods of no play and the appropriateness of the MemoLine is critically reflected upon.

Mobile applications have a great potential in making everyday environments more accessible from the cognitive point of view, allowing neurodiverse people, such as individuals with autism, dementia, or ADHD, to gain independency and find continuous support. This workshop will discuss the main technological, methodological, theoretical and design issues that researchers and practitioners are facing when designing mobile devices and services for neurodiversity, exploring novel strategies to address them. In doing so, we want to focus on the neurodiverse people's idiosyncratic needs, also exploring ways for directly involving them in the design process.

Personas are a widely used tool to keep real users in mind, while avoiding stereotypical thinking in the design process. Yet, creating personas can be challenging. Starting from Cooper's approach for constructing personas, this paper details how behavioral theory can contribute substantially to the development of personas. We describe a case study in which Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is used to develop five distinctive personas for the design of a digital coach for sustainable weight loss. We show how behavioral theories such as SDT can help to understand what genuinely drives and motivates users to sustainably change their behavior. In our study, we used SDT to prepare and analyze interviews with envisioned users of the coach and to create complex, yet engaging and highly realistic personas that make users' basic psychological needs explicit. The paper ends with a critical reflection on the use of behavioral theories to create personas, discussing both challenges and strengths.

As cycling is increasingly promoted as an environment-friendly, cheap and even fast alternative, there exists an increasing need to civically involve the potentially engaged and opinionated user group of cyclists. Therefore, we designed and evaluated Bicycle Barometer, an interactive bicycle count display that gathers the opinions from cyclists and conveys real-time, multi-dimensional data to them regarding cycling behavior. Our user-centered design process focused on optimizing the user experience by comparing several alternative cyclist-specific interaction designs, which resulted in the combination of a pressure sensitive floor mat, push button and low-resolution LED display. An in-the-wild evaluation study resulted in a set of design recommendations for cyclist-specific interaction, providing concrete insights into how a specifically targeted interaction method for public display is able to afford engagement and enthusiasm from a particular target audience.

In this paper, we investigate the potential of controlled in-the-wild studies as an evaluation methodology that merges the benefits of lab-based and in-the-wild studies. Our exploratory investigation builds upon a comparative, between subject experiment benchmarking different interaction features of a custom public installation that visualized a series of urban datasets. In order to evaluate the usefulness of the in-the-wild versus the controlled in-the-wild methodologies, we compared the resulting findings in terms of participant engagement, insight generation, and social interaction. We propose that a controlled in-the-wild study offers a viable alternative when evaluating more complex interaction methods in public space, hereby potentially reducing the practical efforts of in-the-wild studies to involve participants.

We describe a multimodal method for the analysis of co-design outcomes in participatory design (PD) with children. The multimodal approach we take allows researchers to treat both verbal (notes, writings) and tangible material out-comes as complementary ways of communicating design ideas. We argue that an integrated approach in which both PD outcomes are compared and contrasted can result in a richer analysis, in which underlying values can be identified more clearly. To illustrate the method, we describe a PD process with primary school children.

This paper presents a board game approach as a UX research technique to assess potential user experiences regarding a future product. It discusses how the use of a board game may provide a) a safe research environment in which participants feel comfortable to share their thoughts and experiences in a group setting, and b) a tool to facilitate users to think about their needs regarding a future product. The use of the board game approach is illustrated by a case study in the context of developing a new train information system. The design of the board game that was used is described in detail, as well as how the game was used to elicit potential future experiences. A survey amongst the participants showed that the board game was appreciated as a surprising, pleasant and "safe" research method.

To encourage ethical practices in participatory design with children the CHECk tool was created. This paper reports on an expert review of the CHECk tool and a validating case study. Four main challenges to the CHECk tool are identified: (1) how to inform children on the research and their role herein, (2) distinguishing between project values and designer or researcher's personal values, (3) accounting for the dynamic nature and social constructedness of values in design, and (4) the emergence of values in all stakeholders including child design partners. We advocate complementing CHECk with interactive storytelling and show how this narrative can be used to not only inform participation and achieve ethical symmetry, but also to negotiate values with child design partners.

In this paper, we describe the research and conceptualization process in which a design team aimed at creating a number of innovative concepts for interactive applications for hearing impaired children, in order to improve their quality of life. The design team experimented with various ways to include hearing-impaired children and their parents and teachers in this process. First, an inspiration phase was organized in which two field researchers used various ethnographic methods to gain a better understanding of hearing-impaired children. Next, the design team held two ideation sessions, which resulted in 13 concepts. After thorough evaluation of these concepts with all stakeholders involved, three concepts remained. One pedagogical concept was chosen to elaborate further on with the target group and is currently under development in a new research project. The paper ends with a series of recommendations for design teams focusing on hearing-impaired children.

Combining the techniques of paper prototyping and card sorting into a single session has the benefits of helping users to understand a new technology on the one hand, and of gaining insight into the users’ mental models of that technology on the other hand. However, acquainting users with a new technology via a paper prototype might affect their mental models, as assessed with the card sorting technique. The aim of this paper was to explore the possibility of combining the two techniques in a single research session. Thirty-seven users participated in a study concerning a payment system based on Near Field Communication (NFC). Eight group sessions were organized, including both a paper prototyping exercise and a card sorting exercise. The order of the exercises was alternated. The findings of this case study seem to suggest that the paper prototyping exercise resulted into deeper insights into the participants’ mental models resulting from the card sorting exercise. At the same time, paper prototyping seemed to prevent participants to come up with new names for their card sorting categories.

If we want future products and services to be designed for a specific target group, we need to assess the latent needs of this target group. Assessing these needs can be done using generative research techniques. This paper describes the development of the digital workbook, a digital tool to be used in the sensitizing stage of a contextmapping study, a methodology for generative research. Evaluation of the digital workbook shows the great potential of using the possibilities of web 2.0 to create digital research tools which combine the size and low costs of online surveys with the richness of data provided by generative research methods.