Supporting Emergency Shelter Staff: The Co-Design and Deployment of a Human-Centred Data-Navigation Interface

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science (MSc)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

Science

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Masrani, Teale

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• He, Helen Ai
• Messier, Geoffrey

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• He, Helen Ai
• Messier, Geoffrey
• Dimitropoulos, Georgina
• Voida, Amy

• human computer interaction
• homelessness
• participatory design
• human data interaction
• HCI
• UX design
• user experience design
• housing shelter
• human centered computing

Statement dc:rights

• Unless otherwise indicated, this material is protected by copyright and has been made available with authorization from the copyright owner. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

https://doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/46580

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ucalgary.scholaris.ca:1880/118984