Chapter 1 Diverse End UserRequirements John Grundy Tanjila Kanij Jennifer McIntosh Hourieh Khalajzadeh and Ingo Mueller_2

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Chapter 1

Diverse End User

Requirements

John Grundy, Tanjila Kanij, Jennifer McIntosh, Hourieh Khalajzadeh and Ingo Mueller

Software is designed and developed primarily to serve human needs. However, many software

systems continue to fail to take into account diverse end users’ characteristics, causing frus-

tration, errors and even potentially life threatening situations. These end user human-centric

aspects include, but are not limited to, diverse age, ethnicity, gender, personality, cognitive

style, language, culture, physical and mental challenges, emotional reactions, socio-economic

status, etc. Software applications need to cover many if not all of these end user human-centric

aspects in order to provide a suitable interface, workﬂow and solution for diverse end users.

There may be a number of reasons software engineers do not sufﬁciently take their end user

human-centric aspects into account. This includes poor understanding of user needs, inappro-

priate designs and time pressures [27, 11, 3, 8]. Some larger organisations have dedicated

UX/UI and/or customer experience teams that separate developers from end users [5]. Many

companies are very small and developers need to do all such work themselves, but lack sufﬁ-

cient training in UX, participatory design or other human-centric design methods [18, 15, 21].

Software developers are generally well-educated, relatively young, mostly male, most well-

arXiv:2210.02543v1 [cs.SE] 5 Oct 2022

CHAPTER 1

conversant in English, of high socio-economic status, and are very comfortable with technology.

Because of this, they may ﬁnd it difﬁcult to empathise, understand and subsequently incorpo-

rate diverse human-centric aspects during the software engineering process [10, 14, 23, 8].

As part of our larger research effort to improve support for diverse end user human-centric

aspects during software development, we wanted to better understand how developers cur-

rently go about addressing these challenging human-centric aspects of their end users in con-

temporary software development projects. We wanted to ﬁnd out which are the key end user

human-centric aspects that software developers currently ﬁnd challenging to address, and how

they currently go about trying to address diverse end user human-centric aspects. We wanted

to ﬁnd out what sorts of end user human-centric aspects they tend to encounter, which ones

they view as more important and which more challenging to address, what techniques (if any)

they currently use to address (some of) them, and where they perceive further research in this

area could be done to provide them practical support. To this end we carried out a detailed

online survey of developers and development team managers, receiving 60 usable responses.

We interviewed 12 developers and managers from a range of different practice domains, role

specialisations and experience levels to explore further details about issues.

Human Aspects of Users

Below are some, but by no means all, end user human-centric aspects that software teams

need to consider:

Gender: Several prominent mainstream articles and books have highlighted gender bias in

various technologies, including apps and smart living technologies [19, 24]. Recent work has

investigated how software, and other systems, are gender biased in various ways [1].

Age: Many smart living systems focus on supporting ageing people. Many educational

software systems are targeted to support young children [9, 16]. People of differing ages may

have quite different expectations, challenges and reactions to the same software, that need to

be addressed [25, 13].

Ethnicity and Culture: Software that fails to take into account or is biased in terms of

ethnicity of people is highly problematic, especially for many emerging smart city applications

CHAPTER 1

e.g. policing and surveillance [7].

Physical/Mental Challenges: Many people live with mental health challenges, cognitive

impairment and a wide variety of physical challenges, e.g. impaired mobility, sight, hearing, and

speech [23, 28]. Many software solutions have been developed to assist with these challenges,

or to take account of them to increase accessibility to software [2, 22].

Language: Different users speak different languages, have different educational attainment

levels, speciﬁc colloquialisms and jargon, and different language competencies. Considering

these aspects is particularly important during dialogue design, including multi-lingual software

and software that adapts to different user dialogue preferences [20].

Human Values: Values, e.g. inclusiveness, equality, privacy, openness, etc. reﬂect how,

why and to what degree humans value people, objects and ideas [26]. Many apps conﬂict with

one or more human values, causing expectation mismatches and reducing app usage, take-up

and acceptance [17].

Emotions: Different people react differently to technology solutions from an emotional per-

spective. This includes positive reactions e.g. to a smart home solution providing a feeling of

safety, to negative reactions to the same software e.g. feeling lack of control or being monitored

intrusively [4].

Engagement and Entertainment: Some people are highly driven by enjoyment, enter-

tainment and ‘fun’ aspects of using software – computer games and gamiﬁcation. Developers

need to be aware of how to best design such solutions to achieve high levels of engagement

and enjoyment [6, 12].

Study Design

We formulated the following research questions to guide our study:

RQ1: What are the range and nature of end user human-centric aspects that have to be

addressed by software developers?

RQ2: How are different human-centric aspects addressed at different phases of software

development?

RQ3: What current support is available to developers and what improvement is needed?

CHAPTER 1

Survey and Interviews

We designed an online survey targeted at a broad range of software developers and software

team managers, to provide us with a big picture view of current practices, challenges and ap-

proaches being used to address key end user human-centric aspects in modern software de-

velopment. The survey was composed of three sections: Demographic questions; Participant

views on end user human-centric aspects ; and Particular techniques – guidelines, practices,

tools used to address diverse end user human aspects. To complement this online survey

we developed an interview protocol allowing us to drill down to more detailed information in

one-on-one interviews. We wanted to selectively interview eligible developers to ﬁnd out more

insight on this topic.

Recruitment and Data Collection

We ran our developer survey mid-2020 to late-2020. We recruited participants from our per-

sonal network, by advertising on LinkedIn and Twitter and through snowballing. We were

particularly interested in surveying those developing software applications where (some of) the

end users of the software have particular “challenges” e.g. physical, mental, age (very young

or ageing), language proﬁciency, low socio-economic status, low access to technology and/or

technology skills, and so on. We wanted to enhance the broad picture obtained from our survey

to capture more speciﬁc information about development challenges and discuss these in detail

with selected interviewees. We recruited for the interviews from our own professional software

developer networks, but also asked survey respondents to volunteer to be interviewed. We

then selected from these contacts and volunteers a representative range of interviewees (do-

main of work, role, experience, etc). Originally we planned to conduct face-to-face interviews.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, all the interviews were conducted via Zoom. This allowed us to

interview several participants from other countries and time zones.

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Chapter1DiverseEndUserRequirementsJohnGrundy,TanjilaKanij,JenniferMcIntosh,HouriehKhalajzadehandIngoMuellerSoftwareisdesignedanddevelopedprimarilytoservehumanneeds.However,manysoftwaresystemscontinuetofailtotakeintoaccountdiverseendusers'characteristics,causingfrus-tration,errorsandevenpotentiallyli...

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Chapter 1 Diverse End UserRequirements John Grundy Tanjila Kanij Jennifer McIntosh Hourieh Khalajzadeh and Ingo Mueller_2

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