Peggy Gregory

Expectations and experiences of eHealth in primary care: A qualitative practice-based investigation

OBJECTIVES (1) To assess expectations and experiences of a new eHealth service by patients and staff in three primary care settings; (2) to ascertain attitudes to a range of future, primary care-oriented eHealth services. DESIGN Qualitative case study. SETTING Three UK general practices introducing an eHealth service for booking patient appointments. PARTICIPANTS Ninety patients purposively selected from users and non-users of the new service and 28 staff (clinicians, management and administrative staff). RESULTS Actual patient use of the service was lower than stated intention. Patients and staff felt that more active promotion of the service would have resulted in more use. Low usage did not result in a negative assessment of the service by most staff. Different patient groupings were identified with characteristics that may be used as predictors of eHealth service use and indicators of training needs. GPs and patients expressed opposing viewpoints on a range of future eHealth services. CONCLUSIONS Take-up of eHealth services may be lower than expected. To overcome patient barriers, factors that may narrow the intention-behaviour gap such as level of service promotion, GP endorsement, and usage by different patient groups, should be investigated. For clinician barriers, the eHealth evidence base needs strengthening, while for primary care practices, a learning process including staff training needs to be instituted. The differing views of patients and GPs about components of eHealth means that policymakers need to plan for a lengthy political process to obtain agreement on contentious issues if they are to achieve successful eHealth services.

Requirements for the design of a handwriting recognition based writing interface for children

This paper describes how the design of a novel writing interface for children was informed by requirements gathering. The derivation of a set of system requirements from observations of children using early prototypes of the interface and from modelling the system is described, and then two methods of gathering further requirements by surveying children are outlined. The relative advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed. The children were not able to contribute to the full range of requirements necessary for a complete system, but they contributed fun requirements that the observational work failed to identify. A model of the childs relationship to interactive systems is used to discuss why this is the case.

CHECk: a tool to inform and encourage ethical practice in participatory design with children

When working with children in participatory design activities ethical questions arise that are not always considered in a standard ethics review. This paper highlights five challenges around the ethics of the value of design and the ethics of the childrens participation and presents a new tool, CHECk that deals with three of these challenges by virtue of two checklists that are designed to challenge researchers in CCI and HCI to critically consider the reasons for involving children in design projects and to examine how best to describe design activities in order that children can better consent to participate.

UX design in agile: a DSDM case study

Integrating User Experience (UX) design with agile development continues to be the subject of academic studies and practitioner discussions. Most of the existing literature focuses on SCRUM and XP, but in this paper we investigate a technical company who use DSDM. Unlike other agile methods, DSDM provides a configurable framework and a set of roles that covers the whole software development process. While elements of the UX design integration experience were similar to those reported with other agile methods, working practices to mitigate the challenges were identified using DSDMs standard elements. Specifically, communication challenges were mitigated by extending two of DSDMs standard roles. In addition, a change of focus between a design-led phase and a development-led phase of the project changed the communication challenges. Agile teams need to be aware that this change of focus can happen and the implications that it has for their work.

Agile Challenges in Practice: A Thematic Analysis

As agile is maturing and becoming more widely adopted, it is important that researchers are aware of the challenges faced by practitioners and organisations. We undertook a thematic analysis of 193 agile challenges collected at a series of agile conferences and events during 2013 and 2014. Participants were mainly practitioners and business representatives along with some academics. The challenges were thematically analysed by separate authors, synthesised, and a list of seven themes and 27 sub-themes was agreed. Themes were Organisation, Sustainability, Culture, Teams, Scale, Value and Claims and Limitations. We compare our findings against previous attempts to identify and categorise agile challenges. While most themes have persisted we found a shift of focus towards sustainability, business engagement and transformation, as well as claims and limitations. We identify areas for further research and a need for innovative methods of conveying academic research to industry and industrial problems to academia.

From England to Uganda: Children Designing and Evaluating Serious Games

The participation of end-users in the design and evaluation of technologies has long been an important principle in human–computer interaction. This article reports a study to ascertain to what extent children using participatory methods could effectively design for a surrogate population. Fifty children, from a UK primary school, participated in a design activity to specify a serious game for children in Uganda. The children’s designs were analyzed and were shown to have effectively incorporated learning and gaming aspects. Based on these designs a serious game was developed. This new serious game and the commercial game Angry Birds were both evaluated for fun with 25 children in Uganda, using the Fun Toolkit and the This or That method. The results suggested that the children found both games fun, thus confirming that the children in the United Kingdom could effectively design a fun game for a surrogate population. Despite the positive results, the reliability of the evaluation methods is questioned. Inconsistencies were noted within the individual evaluation tools and the comparative results for some constructs yielded a low reliability score. We conclude that further research is required to establish suitable evaluation methods for evaluating fun with children in developing countries.

On the integration of user centred design in agile development

The integration of the User Centred Design (UCD) in Agile systems development processes (Agile) is not without problems. The context of Agile strongly affects the possibilities of IT professionals to conduct user centred activities in their work. In this workshop we will address challenges and success stories and best practices from integrating UCD into Agile in practice, values and perspectives underpinning UCD and Agile in theory, theories and methods relevant for doing research on Agile and UCD as well as the future of research trends on the integration of UCD in Agile. The overall objective of this workshop is to provide a venue for researchers and practitioners, from within and outside of HCI, to begin the process of shaping the future of Agile and UCD research. The workshop has two goals: (1) Identifying future trends for research on Agile and UCD (2) Identify challenges and success stories when working with UCD and Agile.

The Use of Social Theories in 20 Years of WG 8.2 Empirical Research

We study the use of social theories in empirical Information Systems research in the IFIP WG 8.2 conference proceedings since the 1984 Manchester conference. Our results are that interpretivist research and the use of qualitative methods have increased significantly and that only 22 percent of included papers generate theory or concepts according to a narrow definition of theory based on Walsham’s classification; the majority of WG 8.2 researchers thus appear reluctant to generalize to theory from their findings, particularly when undertaking interpretivist research. However, using a wide definition of theory that includes researchers’ own theory used in their papers, we suggest that additional theory is in fact being generated although in a non-explicit manner.We close by pointing out the benefits of theory generation, inviting WG 8.2 researchers to make their use of theory more explicit and to familiarize themselves with the view that there are forms of generality which are possible within the interpretivist paradigm.

Bridging the gap between research and agile practice: an evolutionary model

There is wide acceptance in the software engineering field that industry and research can gain significantly from each other and there have been several initiatives to encourage collaboration between the two. However there are some often-quoted challenges in this kind of collaboration. For example, that the timescales of research and practice are incompatible, that research is not seen as relevant for practice, and that research demands a different kind of rigour than practice supports. These are complex challenges that are not always easy to overcome. Since the beginning of 2013 we have been using an approach designed to address some of these challenges and to bridge the gap between research and practice, specifically in the agile software development arena. So far we have collaborated successfully with three partners and have investigated three practitioner-driven challenges with agile. The model of collaboration that we adopted has evolved with the lessons learned in the first two collaborations and been modified for the third. In this paper we introduce the collaboration model, discuss how it addresses the collaboration challenges between research and practice and how it has evolved, and describe the lessons learned from our experience.

Overcoming challenges in collaboration between research and practice: the agile research network

There is wide acceptance in the software engineering field that industry and research can gain significantly from each other and there have been several initiatives for encouraging collaboration between the two. However there are some often-quoted challenges in this kind of collaboration. For example, that the timescales of research and practice are incompatible, that research is not seen as relevant for practice, and that research demands a different kind of rigour than practice supports. These are complex challenges that are not always easy to overcome. For the last year we have been using an approach designed to address some of these challenges and to bridge the gap between research and practice, specifically in the agile software development arena. So far we have collaborated successfully with two partners and have investigated two practitioner-driven challenges with agile. In this short paper we will introduce the approach, how it addresses the collaboration challenges between research and practice, and describe the lessons learned from our experience.