Nicola Marsden

Heilbronn University · IT/H-InfaM

Personas often aim to improve product designers' ability to "see through the eyes of" target users through the empathy personas can inspire - but personas are also known to promote stereotyping. This tension can be particularly problematic when personas (who, of course as "people" have genders) are used to promote gender inclusiveness - because rei...

To develop a computer-based counselling system (CBCS) for the improvement of attitudes towards physical activity in chronically ill patients and to pilot its efficacy and acceptance in primary care. The system is tailored to patients' disease and motivational stage. During a pilot study in five German general practices, patients answered questions...

Using personas in requirement analysis and software development is becoming more and more common. The potential and problems with this method of user representation are discussed controversially in HCI research. While personas might help focus on the audience, prioritize, challenge assumptions, and prevent self-referential design, the success of th...

Data science has emerged as a critical field for organizations seeking to harness the power of big data to inform strategic decisions and gain a competitive edge. However, the demand for data scientists far exceeds the currently available pool of qualified candidates, making it a significant challenge for organizations to hire and train the right t...

This paper reports on research on responsible innovation for last-mile urban delivery. We designed, developed and tested a fleet of autonomous electric vehicles that operate in a new urban district developed as part of the federal horticulture exhibition 2019 in Heilbronn, Germany. Hereby not only the technical aspects play an important role but al...

In virtual environments, avatars are used to represent users. Previous research focusing on video games has found that similarity of self and avatar leads to higher satisfaction with one’s avatar. We extend the existing research by examining avatar use in a real-world professional training setting. We asked 472 participants in a full-time online tr...

Innovations like autonomous delivery vehicles (ADV) have the potential to transform last-mile delivery to make it more sustainable and human-centered. Yet only if these technologies are socially acceptable can they live up to their potential. Using the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), we assessed how different social groups were perceived when they...

Der zweite Fellow-Jahrgang des KI-Campus teilt in einem neuen Sammelband seine Erfahrungen mit der Integration digitaler Lernangebote zum Thema Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) in die Hochschullehre. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf der Anwendungsorientierung. Zehn Beiträge zeigen das breite Spektrum an Einsatzmöglichkeiten der offen lizenzierten und frei verf...

Designers are now taught that empathy with users is crucial to technology design. We offer a warning that this dictum and its implementation, despite admirable intentions, can promote exclusion in design: Empathy will not bring the desired benefit to the design process if it is naively construed and understood as a feminine trait, if shortcuts are...

Avatar-based virtual reality (VR) is becoming more prevalent in industry and educational settings. There is, however, limited research on the extent to which gender stereotypes are present in this environment. The university laboratory study presented in this paper was conducted in a VR environment with participants who were randomly assigned to ma...

Participatory Design means recognizing that those who will be affected by a future technology should have an active say in its creation. Yet, despite continuous interest in involving people as future users and consumers into designing novel and innovative future technology, participatory approaches in technology design remain relatively underdevelo...

Everyone has self-doubt. But many women lack confidence, feel unqualified, think that they lack skill, are imperfect, feel out of step with expectations, and are unclear about how to succeed. But with tolerance for imperfection, room to grow, positive feedback, supportive people to work with, clear expectations for success, and feeling valued and c...

Successful women in tech find Local Role Models who challenge, support, and coach them to career success. Like early influencers, more experienced colleagues model good professional behavior and are present in daily life for guidance. These more experienced people also communicate career possibilities through their actions and choices. When the wor...

Women often advance when they are pushed into a challenge and are supported to succeed by family, teachers, managers, and co-workers. Many women hesitate to ask for a challenge or the next promotion. They may not feel skilled or comfortable with self-promotion. They may look at a job description and decide they are not qualified if they do not meet...

Technology is a maker industry. Diverse teams design and develop products, websites, apps, systems, services, cars, refrigerators, medical equipment, and more. Like any maker industry, making comes with getting continuous feedback or critique.[7]But 80% of the women we surveyed lose confidence when they are criticized.

Developers, designers, project leads, and user researchers—all the women we interviewed—want to work on real tangible products; projects that are important to the company, the industry, or the world. Women want high-impact and high-profile challenges. They do not want to be bored and switch jobs if they stop learning and feeling challenged. Women i...

The @Work Experience Framework identifies six daily work experiences that women need to thrive. The power of a framework is that it circumscribes and focuses what organizations should examine in their efforts to retain women. Central to these experiences is the role of the team and how they experience their participation, belonging, and value. As w...

Women thrive in a dynamic, work-focused team where together they make or explore something that matters. This team culture is results-focused, no drama, non-judgmental, and punctuated with a lively exchange of ideas among high-performing, mutually respected people. Within the team women both lead and follow, feel valued for their work, and are aske...

In Chapter 10, we called upon teams and individuals to hold themselves accountable for their behaviors in order to create a more valuing culture. In Part II overall, we provided recommendations and tools to tune practices so they work well for women and everyone. In this chapter, we describe interventions to help teams explicitly define the values...

In the last three chapters, we offered interventions to interrupt bias and manage interpersonal chaos within some of the core processes in tech work. As we said, interpersonal chaos can end up excluding and devaluing underrepresented populations and those with less experience. In Part Idescribing the @Work Experience factors, we have also emphasize...

Women with children thrive when their team and managers make it easy to balance home and work. Women may worry that they will be judged poorly if they have to take time to care for children. And they fear that they will be excluded from challenging work once they become moms. But when both the team and managers work out strategies to make hard work...

At the core of our redesign approach is the principle of sneak attacks. We look for small changes to existing practices central to both improving the work of diverse teams and the experience of women. The Team Onboarding Checklist is just a checklist. Yet, it is a tool to help clarify and improve an otherwise undefined onboarding process that also...

We started the Women in Tech Retention Project to understand why women are leaving our field twice as often as men. Through a combination of field research and surveys, we identified the factors in The @Work Experience Framework, which point organizations to the experiences they need to create to retain women. Our research was focused on women acro...

The first step in helping women thrive is making sure they are set up for success. Yet, 49% of women in our survey indicate that they do not feel guided or supported in how to be successful. We won’t retain women in tech—or indeed any new hires—if they do not know what to do to be successful. More importantly, we can’t help them be successful if we...

InPart II, we have introduced tested interventions that help diverse teams improve the way they work. Our interventions structure core practices so they work better for women and all team members. They help remove interpersonal chaos and ensure that all members have a voice. They foster a valuing culture that can use feedback well. Our three-pronge...

Scrum, the most popular form of agile, is often cited for creating a positive working environment for women. Its values, principles, roles, and practices are said to hold great potential to promote fairness and gender equality. But does it? Social scientific literature has identified two key dimensions to analyze processes. The first dimension exam...

Virtual reality (VR) has become more and more established over the last years, yet it still faces several issues of gender fairness and inclusivity. We argue that besides known problems such as insufficient catering to women's processing style of visual clues, stereotypes can also limit females' access to VR. We present a study in which we explore...

This paper presents a mixed-method study performed in the software department of an automotive supplier operating in India as an offshore service provider to a German company. The research focuses on the social dimension and human aspects involved in software testing in an intercultural setting. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of testers' per...

Seit Beginn der COVID-19-Pandemie wurden verschiedenste Einflussfaktoren auf die Akzeptanz von Schutzmaßnahmen untersucht. Ziel der vorliegenden Studie ist es, diese Faktoren aufzugreifen, zu ergänzen und in einem integrierten Modell zu untersuchen. 651 Personen wurden im Sommer 2020 online befragt und es wurde regressionsanalytisch ausgewertet, we...

Verhaltensorientierte Qualifizierungsprozesse, wie zum Beispiel Coaching oder Führungskräftetraining, werden zunehmend mit Hilfe digitaler Medien durchgeführt. Dies bietet Ortsunabhängigkeit und zeitliche Flexibilität. Die veränderte Kommunikation in der Online-Situation spielt für Verhaltenstrainings eine entscheidende Rolle: Richtig eingesetzt ka...

For over 40 years, we’ve been encouraging women to choose technology careers. But even with extensive recruiting, women continue to be underrepresented in technology jobs compared to other professions. Worse, once hired, women leave the field mid-career twice as often as men. High tech needs women to fulfil necessary jobs and to increase innovation...

Schon seit mehr als zehn Jahren sind digitale Spiele in Deutschland als Kulturgut anerkannt und Computerspielen wird im Kontext des medienpädagogischen Diskurses – wenn auch eher vereinzelt – als spezifisch situierte medial-kulturelle Praktik thematisiert, die als „eine kulturell geprägte, aktive und soziale Auseinandersetzung mit dem Spiel als Art...

Geschlecht ist ein grundlegendes Organisationskriterium der menschlichen Wahrnehmung. Designprozesse, die von Menschen gesteuert werden oder sich an Menschen orientieren, können also immer auch unter dem Blickwinkel betrachtet werden, in welcher Weise hier vergeschlechtlichte Personenwahrnehmung eine Rolle spielt. Wird Geschlecht im Gestaltungsproz...

Participation of women in IT is still low and companies wonder which external communication measures are necessary to attract more female personnel. To gain a richer understanding of adequate gender sensitive ways of communicating towards girls and women, one needs to take into account contextual challenges. Following a Participatory Action Researc...

In this paper, we describe the feminist perspectives that have informed design in the HCI community, and develop an argument for an approach that translates these broad commitments into a pragmatic design space, drawing on emancipatory agendas such as participatory design. As designers of technologies, we regard creating research infrastructures th...

Women employed in video game companies are facing several barriers regarding equality and career chances. Scholars argue that career development of women is at times hindered because of hegemonic masculinity in organizations, with networks and other social factors playing a more important role than qualifications. This means that women miss out on...

Personas are considered a key method to induce empathy for users. However, they are also said to trigger stereotyping, e.g. by using photographs that convey information about gender, ethnicity, or age of the persona. To investigate this assumption, we conducted an eye-tracking study with 93 students from degree programs in computer science. The par...

Das Projekt IT&me hat die Unterstützung von IT-Expertinnen durch eine kontinuierlich erweiterbare Wissens- und Vernetzungsplattform zum Ziel. Zur Gewährleistung einer nutzerinnengerechten Umsetzung und zur Erhöhung der Akzeptanz des entstehenden Angebotes wird ein Participatory-Design-Ansatz verfolgt, der im vorliegenden Artikel beschrieben wird. U...

Im Kontext IT, Digitalisierung und Diversität stehen (nicht nur) IT-Unternehmen vor vielfältigen Fragen und Herausforderungen. Gefordert sind gendertheoretisch informierte Diskurse sowie gender- und diversitätssensible Maßnahmen, die sich in der beruflichen Praxis umsetzen lassen. Hierfür muss wissenschaftliches Geschlechterwissen in einem Dialog z...

Empathy is seen as essential for user-centered design and thus needs to be taken into consideration in design education. Personas are a design method that is meant to promote empathy with users and are also used to foster an empathic design approach in educational settings. Empathic involvement is considered to be particularly important to overcome...

Gender disparity in high tech is a long-standing challenge. The number of women in tech is lower than 30 years ago; women leave the field 50% more often than men; attrition costs companies money and talent. This SIG addresses the issue of gender and retention by changing key work practices. As a maker community critique, giving and receiving feedba...

Personas are valuable tools to help designers get to know their users and adopt their perspectives. Yet people are complex and multiple identities have to be considered in their interplay to account for a comprehensive representation-otherwise, personas might be superficial and prone to activate stereotypes. Therefore, the way users' identities are...

Virtual reality has become popular in the past few years and is expanding its domain of application beyond entertainment. One of these applications is driving simulation, which can enhance immersion level with the assistance of head-mounted displays. This paper reports the results of a virtual reality driving simulation study regarding gender diffe...

Unser Beitrag zeigt den praktischen Einsatz der Persona-Methode, um im Zyklus eines Entwicklungsprojekts, Anforderungen zukünftiger Nutzer*innen zu integrieren und reflektieren. Das Projekt wird partizipativ in einem agilen Vorgehen umgesetzt und hat eine Lern- und Vernetzungsplattform für weibliche IT-Professionals zum Ziel. Im Fokus des Beitrags...

In spite of many initiatives to attract and retain women in technology, the numbers are sobering. One contributing factor is a mismatch between the expectations and needs of women in technology and workplace realities in technology companies. Through qualitative and quantitative studies, we identified key factors necessary in the daily work experie...

"Is Virtual Reality sexist?" ran a headline in Fast Company magazine - to which many technophiles retorted that technology was neutral and could not, therefore, be discriminating. But women are confronted with numerous problems when using virtual reality. Gender stereotypes, which play a role in all areas of life, also manifest themselves here. In...

HCI has witnessed a turn to practice as a major new paradigm within the field. We contribute to this line of research by analyzing social actions in MMORPG raiding groups. Based on a qualitative study of World of Warcraft, we turn to culture-inclusive action theory to understand how culture, game design, norms, skills and motivations come together...

Women interested in computing are still facing several problems considering equality and career chances. Companies realize the opportunities of diversity and yet for several reasons they are struggling to hire or integrate young female professionals. Although gender study research provides promising frameworks there are still issues in applying the...

Computer-mediated communication is increasingly used in student interactions. Since this mode of communication loses none of the socio-cultural complexity that shapes face-to-face communication, gender and sexism is an important factor. We studied three student teams in an international classroom setting that used computer-mediated communication to...

The project IT&me aims to provide support for female IT experts, by developing a continuously extendable knowledge and networking platform. This is designed to make available relevant learning content on digitalization and IT subjects, taking into account the individual context of each female learner. In this paper, we present the results of a quan...

The GenderMag cognitive walkthrough with gendered personas has been developed as an inspection method to improve the usability of software artefacts for diverse user groups. It can be used by design teams to evaluate their software and find usability issues. We studied the effectiveness of this method in 49 sessions with IT professionals and softwa...

Improving workforce diversity in high tech is an ongoing challenge. We are currently analyzing a survey with 403 participants from the US and found that IT processionals have different experiences based on their job role. HCI professionals evaluate the core factors regarding work experience (e.g., having a valuing team, being offered challenges and...

Increasing the number of women and other underrepresented groups is a long-standing problem in high tech. Huge investments are being made to grow enrollments in college STEM programs, change hiring practices, and tackle workplace issues. But representations haven't changed. Since 2005 the percentage of women remains stagnant at 22%. Moreover, 50% o...

Trends like re-urbanization and the growing e-commerce market present logistics service providers with unforeseeable challenges. Within this context, autonomous delivery vehicles are often stated to be an innovative solution for urban logistics. This paper introduces the status quo of the research regarding automated transportation and presents the...

Empathy with users is seen as crucial in the design process. Empathising with users is not trivial, especially if they are different from the design team, e.g. have a different gender or age. Additionally, people differ in the extent to which they empathise and have emotional responses towards others. In an empirical study, we explored the effect o...

We present a case study of persona development, foregrounding gender as a primary axis of design. In a participatory design process, we developed personas to represent users of a learning and networking platform for female IT professionals. These personas are a means of ensuring that the female perspective is represented in the design process. We c...

This paper presents a mixed-method study performed in the software department of an automotive supplier operating in India as an offshore service provider to a German company. The research focuses on the social dimension and human aspects involved in software testing in an intercultural setting. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of testers' per...

Personas are a tool in user-centered software design to make users' goals and needs tangible for the designers of the product. Engaging with personas is seen as a means for empathizing with users and avoiding product development from the developers' own perspective ("I-methodology"). In an empirical study with 59 participants, we investigated wheth...

Zusammenfassung Ziel des Projekts IT&me ist es, IT-Expertinnen dabei zu unterstützen, relevantes Wissen angepasst an Bedarf und Lebenssituation aufzubauen. Hierfür entsteht eine kontinuierlich erweiterbare Wissens-und Vernetzungsplattform, die unter Berücksichtigung des individuellen Kontextes jeder Lernerin relevante Mikrolerninhalte bereitstellt....

This paper reports on a study regarding the conditions that reduce simulation sickness in virtual reality driving simulation. Simulation sickness in virtual reality applications is frequent and thus poses a major obstacle in obtaining data from participants involved in these simulations. Many solutions have been presented by various sources on how...

Computer-mediated communication and remote collaboration has become an unexceptional norm as an educational modality for distance and open education, therefore the need to research and analyze students' online learning experience is necessary. This paper seeks to examine the assumptions and expectations held by students in regard to computer-mediat...

Menschen werden bei der Gestaltung von IT-Systemen immer schon mitgedacht, entweder explizit oder aber implizit. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden verschiedene Möglichkeiten, wie Design-und Entwicklungsteams Nutzer_innen in ihre Aktivitäten einbeziehen bzw. diese repräsentieren, aus Genderperspektive betrachtet. Zunächst wird reflektiert, für wen tech...

Two distinguishing characteristics of adult learning most frequently advanced by theorists, are firstly the adults autonomy of direction in the act of learning and secondly the use of personal experience as a learning resource. Digital Learning is facilitated by technology, giving the students some element of control of their learning over time, pl...

Designing a positive user experience for bodily disruptions like incontinence is a major challenge in e-health technologies. We plan on exploring how older women can work with biofeedback from their pelvic floor to retain or regain urinary continence. As a first step, we took stock of existing interaction modes. We present the results of a survey o...

We examined personas to see if (a) gendered persona attributes and (b) the persona presentation, i.e. the randomly assigned gender, would affect the perception of the persona. As stimulus material we used the GenderMag per-sonas that were developed to inform the design process regarding empirically validated gender differences. In a 2x2 experimenta...

The demand for diversity in the population of engineering professionals is growing, following both the general demand for engineering professionals and the explicit need for more diverse teams. Thus, the engineering education community is becoming more interested in identifying factors that influence students' satisfaction with their engineering ed...

(aus dem Inhalt:) Bei Nicht-Übereinstimmung der Schätzungen findet dann eine Diskussion statt. Die agilen Methoden strukturieren diesen Entscheidungsfindungsprozess der Planung also, damit er konstruktiv geführt wird, was durchaus positiv zu bewerten ist. Im Kern bleibt es jedoch so, dass Planung in der agilen Herangehensweise eher auf Meinungen (u...

Im nutzungszentrierten Design werden Personas als zentraler Teil des Gestaltungsprozesses genutzt. Um zu untersuchen, welche Rolle Personas beim Fortschreiben bestehender Geschlechterstereotype spielen, wurden in einer empirischen Analyse 170 Persona-Beschreibungen hinsichtlich des dargestellten sozialen Umfelds, der Freizeitbeschäftigungen und der...

Der Einsatz von Personas als Methode zur Auseinandersetzung mit den Nutzer_innen und ihren Bedürfnissen in der menschzentrierten Gestaltung birgt viel Potenzial, zu sensibilisieren und Stereotypi-sierungen zu vermeiden oder sogar zu durchbrechen. Voraussetzung für den erfolgreichen Einsatz ist zum einen ein reflektierter Umgang mit Stereotypen bei...

Gender zu berücksichtigen heißt meist gerade nicht, "für Männer" und "für Frauen" zu gestalten. Aber was heißt es dann? Der Gender-Check bietet eine Hilfestellung, um die eigene Herangehensweise aus Genderperspektive zu hinterfragen. Die Basis sind Leitfragen, anhand derer das Entwicklungsteam die eigene Arbeit im nutzungszentrierten Designprozess...

Exergaming for adolescents is a promising field of design. Going beyond console-based exergames, smartwatches can utilize the pervasive nature afforded by modern ubiquitous devices and use physical body movement and changes of location as the basis for gameplay. In a formative study of PokéWatch, a mobile location-aware exergame based on the game P...

Im Laufe eines Softwareentwicklungsprozesses muss eine Vielzahl von Entscheidungen getroffen werden – Zeit und Geld sind dabei meist knapp. Warum also noch einen weiteren Aspekt in den Prozess einbauen? Die Antwort ist einfach: Die Berücksichtigung der Genderperspektive kann die Bedarfsgerechtigkeit und Qualität von Software steigern, neue Marktpot...

The work-in-progress outlined in this paper focuses on the role input fields in webforms play in the performance of gender. Based on the premise that doing gender in HCI should be studied both on the macro- and the micro-HCI level, and highlighting the perceived necessity of knowing someone's gender to interact with them, my research explores the m...

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