Multidisciplinary Framework for Creating the Next-generation of Human-centered Design Guidelines
Authors: Polanco Jr Alexis , Liu Tsailu 
Published: October 2023

Human-centered design for students with disabilities is an inherently multidisciplinary endeavor. It requires input from practitioners in the fields of user experience (UX), instructional design, accessibility, software engineering, and more. To that end, this paper seeks to reveal the perspectives of practitioners who have experience across these various disciplines, especially as they pertain to Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students.In a previous study, the author asked practitioners to describe the design guidelines they use in their professions. To contextualize the concept of guidelines, the research participants were introduced to North Carolina State University’s Principles of Universal Design and Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics. The outcome of that study revealed a wide spectrum of guidelines, with little commonality except for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Universal Design.This paper builds off that prior research by interviewing the same practitioners with a renewed focus on the definition of guidelines. In particular: 1) How do these practitioners define “guidelines”, and do these definitions vary between the different disciplines of user experience, accessibility, etc.?2) Do the practitioners’ definitions of “guidelines” change as the end-user becomes more specifically designed? For example, do practitioners expect more, less, or something different when designing for hearing students vs DHH students?3) If these practitioners were empowered to create a theoretical set of design guidelines for DHH middle school-aged students, what process would they follow? The results of this new study demonstrate an awareness in the research participants that experts from different disciplines may need to be engaged in the process of creating design guidelines. More specifically, when asked to create DHH guidelines, the SMEs were often quick to say that they needed to collaborate with individuals who were embedded in the DHH community, i.e., individuals who are Deaf or hard of hearing, or individuals who have acquired second-hand knowledge through being immersed in Deaf culture.Surprisingly, when interviewing these practitioners for a second time, designers were not always explicitly stated as integral to the creation of design guidelines for DHH middle school students. A few reasons emerged for why this is the case: A) On multiple occasions, the research participants lamented that design education today often fails to prepare new designers in the space of accessibility. B) In another instance, a senior software architect felt that engaging designers would be detrimental to the guideline creation process. He would later amend his response to say that he would include a designer only if they had a sufficient background in accessibility. C) In a different instance, a designer took designer participation for granted and assumed that designers would obviously be part of the design guideline process. When asked to clarify why he did not include designers in his process when first asked, he said that his ego led him to assume that he would naturally be part of the process.While both this paper and the previous paper focus on the DHH student experience, the overall goal of this research is to create a reusable framework that will allow subject matter experts (SMEs) to examine the guidelines they use today, and to learn how to create the next generation of design guidelines that will rise to the challenge of human-centered design becoming increasingly multidisciplinary.