While being a good communicator is a key skill for user experience (UX) practitioners, human-computer interaction (HCI) education typically prioritizes the creation of tangible project deliverables, e.g., wireframes, over providing students with a more complete set of communication skills. In this paper, we draw from an analysis of 60 interviews with experienced UX professionals to argue that a nuanced understanding of communication strategies should be explicitly included in HCI education. Specifically, we identify five goals that shape communications between UX practitioners and four distinct audiences and show that they select specific methods (techniques, artifacts, and tools) to achieve these goals. Drawing on theories of situated and authentic learning, we discuss three key implications for HCI educators: embracing rhetorical complexity, simulating real-world communication challenges, and highlighting the performative elements of communication. Educators must embrace these challenges to help students become more effective communicators and prepare them for UX careers.

Design requirements can be gathered through a variety of ways; however, engaging teen audiences in design process can be challenging. We present a novel method for engaging teens in design through a social robot design challenge. Groups of teens participated in the challenge to prototype a social robot that would live in their high school and help address stress, a persistent and pervasive problem for this age group. In this paper, we present our methods and share preliminary findings.

As information and communication technologies (ICTs) become more diffuse, the diversity of users that designers need to consider is growing; this includes people with disabilities and aging populations. As a result, computing education must provide students the means and inspiration to learn about inclusive design. This poster presents top-level findings from 18 interviews with professors from some of the top universities in the US. Our analysis yielded four categories of findings: (1) important student learning outcomes (the most common was for students to embrace diversity); (2) exercises and teaching materials (almost all focused on inclusion of people with disabilities in discovery and evaluation of ICTs); (3) frustrations and challenges (largely focused on how to engage students in accessibility topics); and (4) the importance of instructor initiative to include the topic of accessibility in their teaching. The unifying theme was the high importance of cultivating empathy with end users.

Traditional usability methods are of limited use when evaluating systems designed for distant, diverse populations. In this paper, we describe a study conducted in two Ghanaian villages that evaluated an audio computer designed for people living in oral cultures. Informed by ICTD and orality-grounded HCID, we modified existing usability testing practices and we reflect on the utility of these adaptations. We found that conducting a culturally appropriate study often meant forgoing more traditional approaches in favor of flexible, opportunistic methods. We acknowledge the challenges of adapting traditional usability methods for oral, rural users. However, we found that by implementing strategic modifications led by local staff, our study produced valuable, actionable results.

In this paper, we describe several findings from a multi-year, multi-method study of how information and communication technologies have been adopted and adapted in Central Asia. We have found that mobile phone usage is outpacing the rate of Internet adoption, that access to the Internet is primarily through public access sites carrying with it issues regarding privacy and surveillance, that people rely on their social networks as information sources, that public institutions tend to be fairly weak as citizen resources, and that information seeking and communication are conflated in people's usage patterns with different technologies. In addition, in the developed world social networking software has grown rapidly and shown itself to have significant potential for mobilizing a population. Based on the collection of findings from Central Asia and observing patterns of technology usage in other parts of the world, our research leads to the conclusion that exploring mobile social software holds significant potential as an ICT that meshes well with preexisting patterns of communication and information seeking and also leverages the most predominant pattern of technology adoption. Many of the findings from this research echo results from studies in other geographic areas, and so we anticipate that much of this research will be relevant to developing regions generally.