Supporting Emergency Shelter Staff: The Co-Design and Deployment of a Human-Centred Data-Navigation Interface
Date
2024-06-14
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Abstract
This thesis presents insights from a year-long co-design study with frontline staff at an emergency housing shelter in Canada: The Calgary Drop-In Centre. The homelessness sector encounters high rates of staff turnover due to mental health issues. If these issues interrupt important frontline work, vulnerable clients could miss the opportunity to escape homelessness. While prior research in HCI focuses on designing technology to be used by those experiencing homelessness, I focus on how to design tools to support the frontline staff at emergency shelters. As part of their program-delivery, staff at the Drop-In Centre hold weekly meetings to decide how to move forward with clients who have threatened shelter safety. These discussions are strenuous as staff must consider all aspects of the incident to make a fair decision. During these meetings, staff navigate through an abundance of data about each interaction clients have with the shelter. Navigating through this large volume of data is burdensome, especially since making these decisions already bears a high cognitive and emotional load. Therefore, I collaborated with the Drop-In Centre to co-design and deploy an interactive data-navigation interface for these collaborative decision-making meetings about vulnerable clients. While co-designing the new tool, a design ethnography methodology was employed to understand the role that data and technology play in decision-making, and identify takeaways for future work. From June, 2022, to November, 2023, I conducted one-on-one interviews with staff, facilitated group co-design workshops, engaged in field observations, and elicited feedback on three iterations of the tool. Reflexive thematic analysis was employed to generated themes regarding how staff experience the tool, and their perceived benefits and challenges of using data to make high-stakes decisions about clients. Based on these themes, I articulate high-level design implications. This work emphasizes the need for designers and HCI researchers to consider (1) the degree to which users are willing to outsource their decision-making processes to data, and (2) users' differing preferences for rich, granular data, compared to abstracted visualizations and aggregate measures. The insights gained from this work are transferable to other human-centred organizations where staff make high-stakes, data-driven decisions about their clients.
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human computer interaction, homelessness, participatory design, human data interaction, HCI, UX design, user experience design, housing shelter, human centered computing
Citation
Masrani, T. (2024). Supporting emergency shelter staff: the co-design and deployment of a human-centred data-navigation interface (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.