Capturing the Practices, Challenges, and Needs of Transportation Decision-Makers
This work identifies specific needs for government transportation decision-makers, offering insights for tool design in this domain, but it is incremental as it fills a gap in existing literature without introducing new methods.
The study addressed the underrepresentation of transportation decision-makers' practices, challenges, and needs in HCI literature by conducting interviews with 19 practitioners from Transports Québec, finding that they benefit most from data analysis tools that support data quality awareness, interoperability, and intuitive visual analytics.
Transportation decision-makers from government agencies play an important role in addressing the traffic network conditions, which in turn, have a major impact on the well-being of citizens. The practices, challenges, and needs of this group of practitioners are less represented in the HCI literature. We address this gap through an interview study with 19 practitioners from Transports Québec, a government agency responsible for transportation infrastructures in Québec, Canada. We found that this group of decision-makers can most benefit from research about data analysis tools and platforms that (1) provide information to support data quality awareness, (2) are interoperable with other tools in the complex workflow of the practitioners, and (3) support intuitive and customizable visual analytics. These implications can also be informative to the design of tools supporting other decision-making tasks and domains.