HCAug 30, 2021
Toward an Actionable Socioeconomic-Aware HCIMargaret Burnett, Abrar Fallatah, Catherine Hu et al.
Although inequities for individuals in different socioeconomic situations are starting to capture widespread attention, less attention has been given to the socioeconomic inequities that saturate socioeconomic-diverse individuals' user experiences. To enable HCI practitioners to attend to such inequities and avoid unwittingly introducing them, in this paper we consider a wide body of research relevant to how an individual's socioeconomic status (SES) can affect their user experiences with technology. We synthesize this foundational research to produce a core set of 6 evidence-based SES "facets" (attribute types and value ranges) that directly relate to user experiences for individuals in different SES strata. We then harness these SES facets to produce actionable paths forward -- including a new structured method we call SocioeconomicMag -- by which HCI researchers and practitioners can bring new socioeconomic-aware practices into their everyday HCI work.
SEMay 27, 2019
Engineering Gender-Inclusivity into Software: Tales from the TrenchesClaudia Hilderbrand, Christopher Perdriau, Lara Letaw et al.
Although the need for gender-inclusivity in software itself is gaining attention among both SE researchers and SE practitioners, and methods have been published to help, little has been reported on how to make such methods work in real-world settings. For example, how do busy software practitioners use such methods in low-cost ways? How do they endeavor to maximize benefits from using them? How do they avoid the controversies that can arise in talking about gender? To find out how teams were handling these and similar questions, we turned to 10 real-world software teams. We present these teams experiences "in the trenches," in the form of 12 practices and 3 potential pitfalls, so as to provide their insights to other real-world software teams trying to engineer gender-inclusivity into their software products.
HCMay 7, 2019
Fixing Inclusivity Bugs for Information Processing Styles and Learning StylesZoe Steine-Hanson, Claudia Hilderbrand, Lara Letaw et al.
Most software systems today do not support cognitive diversity. Further, because of differences in problem-solving styles that cluster by gender, software that poorly supports cognitive diversity can also embed gender biases. To help software professionals fix gender bias "bugs" related to people's problem-solving styles for information processing and learning of new software we collected inclusivity fixes from three sources. The first two are empirical studies we conducted: a heuristics-driven user study and a field research industry study. The third is data that we obtained about a before/after user study of inclusivity bugs. The resulting seven potential inclusivity fixes show how to debug software to be more inclusive for diverse problem-solving styles.