 to welcome you all. Thank you so much for attending the ninth annual George J. McMurter lecture. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Dr. Jeffrey Bardzell. I'm the Associate Dean for Graduate and Undergraduate Studies in the College of Information Sciences and Technology. And just before we get started, I have a couple of items to announce first, that this, oops, I can't see my notes. So we've just gone to full screen, sorry about that. This Zoom session is being recorded to allow those unable to participate to watch later. So we'll send out a link shortly after the conclusion. I ask you all to mute your microphones during the lecture and we'll have a Q&A at the end of the lecture today. Please feel free to use the chat and save your questions for the end, but we will do the Q&A at the end. I have a few words to say about the award. This award is given annually, thanks to the generous contribution of Dr. George McMurtry and Margaret McMurtry. They're unable to join us today, but we're obviously super grateful that their contributions supports valuable events such as this one. This award recognizes those IST faculty members in University Park who consistently provide an exceptional learning environment for students in the classroom or online through their innovative teaching and their commitment to learning. This year's recipient is Dr. Allison Murphy, who this past August left University Park for a position at Brandywine campus as the assistant professor of Information Sciences and Technology. So congratulations to Dr. Murphy on the move. Brandywine's gain is our loss. Dr. Murphy excels at teaching students to think critically and creatively about IT design and the socio-technical impacts of technology. She also conducts interdisciplinary research on how to improve the usability of health IT for individuals and organizations through the use of qualitative methods and user experience design principles. Dr. Murphy holds a BS and PhD in Information Sciences and Technology and earn industry certifications as a project management professional, Six Sigma Greenbelt and Agile Scrum Master. Dr. Murphy has received a cash award of $500 as well as a $500 budget allotment to use for learning enhancement initiatives. In addition, she has received an engraved Nittany Lion statue and her name will be engraved on the award plaque currently displayed on the third floor of Westgate. So many congratulations to Dr. Murphy. Please join me in welcoming her. The stage is now hers. Great, thank you so much, Jeff for such a wonderful introduction. I, of course, had technical difficulties right before. I just didn't, in time for the presentation, but I hope you can see me okay and everyone can hear me okay. I'm doing it from my work computer instead of my laptop because of course they pushed an update right before. But thank you all so much for coming. It's wonderful to see so many familiar faces and so many names. I miss many of you at University Park so much and I see some of my Brandywine colleagues are here. The transition to Brandywine has been wonderful. The campus is friendly and welcoming and I'm very lucky to have experienced both University Park and now Brandywine in the College of IST. And thank you all for coming to hear me talk about some things that I'm really passionate about in the teaching space. I thought I'd first start, of course, with some thank yous. Oh, see, now it's not working again. Hold on one sec. There we go. Some thank yous. First and foremost, as Jeff had mentioned, George McMurtry, thank you so much. And I thank you and your wife for creating this award that celebrates teaching, especially at a time where we need creativity and innovation with the changes to online learning and trying to engage our students in new and different ways. I think it's so important that we celebrate each other and the chances that we take in the teaching space. I also learned that George McMurtry was one of the founders of the College of IST. And as some of you know, but some may not, I was actually an IST alumni. In 2004, I was the second graduating class and I have George McMurtry and the other founders to thank for providing a major at a time when something like this didn't exist. I was looking at computer science and computer engineering and it just didn't feel right. And as soon as I stepped onto University Parks campus and visited with the original founders of the college, it just felt right. It was technology and people and understanding how we build meaningful design. And that is something that sparked kind of my passion in that area and has led to a really fulfilling career. So thank you for that. As many of us know, teaching does not happen in a bubble. It is most certainly a team sport. The hallway conversations, when things go wrong, when things go right, having people to celebrate and commiserate with is always something that's so important in teaching. It has also given me the confidence, the kind of step outside of my comfort zone and try new things in the classroom. And so I really want to of course thank the College of IST's faculty as well as the staff who have always been so supportive of me when I try new things in the classroom. And a couple of familiar faces on the screen, as well as all of the rest of you at University Park that I miss so dearly. I'm not getting to see you in the hallways. I also would like to thank our students because I think we have an incredible group of students that makes teaching very rewarding. They are, most of them at least, very engaged and creative and they step up to the challenge when we give them problems to solve in the classroom. And they are the next generation of our IT professionals and I'm very confident that they're gonna do really incredible things. So when I was preparing for this talk, I was reviewing a lot of the other videos which were wonderful. And of course the notes that I had taken about things I thought I talk about had been covered in the last couple of years in some of those talks. And so I thought instead I would focus in on just one topic that I always seem to come back to. And it's been kind of this common thread throughout my industry experience, my research and now my teaching. And that's the concept of empathy. Again, something I think that IST built into the curriculum early on and is the reason I came back to teach in the college. IDEO, which is an organization that I think embodies kind of empathy and design kind of defines this as this deeper understanding of who our users are. Really focusing in on those people that we're designing for including their problems, their frustrations as well as their actual reality. Many times as early designers we tend to design for ourselves, right? We're designing from our own perspective. And therefore we create designs that facilitate our own goals and help alleviate some of our own pains and frustrations. But I find sometimes the problem with that is when we don't have enough representation in the design, development, even testing space we tend to design technologies that unintentionally exclude people. And it's something I think we really need to work on in the IT industry. And that's why I thought I talked today a little bit about my experience with empathy. After I left IST in 2004 I started working for Johnson & Johnson wonderful healthcare company and worked in a lot of different companies within their kind of family of companies. I worked in the pharmaceutical sector as well as in technology innovation in their tech hub and then for commercial products that make me all for brands like Tylenol. And I found in little instances every time I was engaging with my user groups that empathy played such a critical role. And I thought I'd share with you just three short stories of times where I saw empathy teach me something and contribute to the design of our systems. The first story was one of the first projects I got to lead on my own. I was very excited and somewhat terrified to be the sole project manager. I was taking over for another project manager. It was someone who was working with the team for scientists, a very tiny team in our R&D group but they had this one application that they used in the lab and it was from 1996, it was a decade old. We were in the process of upgrading our operating systems as most companies did in the kind of mid 2000s. And so it wasn't compatible with the new operating system which means it posed a risk from a security perspective especially because it was data that was regulated. And so the PM said, we looked at all the requirements we selected two systems they're in the process of picking one so this should be smooth sailing. This is a simple project. And so I was excited. I got to work with users for the first time in the R&D space and I went to the meeting, very excited. Introducing myself saying, great, I heard you guys are looking at different systems and you've chosen to go with the new system. And although the scientists were of course friendly there was attention there. And this was the first time and I talked to my students about this that just because there are good systems out there that you think might be a good fit for your users if they don't want that system they're not gonna be happy about it. And it's our job as IT professionals to make sure that that integration that change management piece is done really well to make sure that we're picking technologies that facilitate that work and don't hold them back in what they're trying to do. And so the senior scientist kind of sat back and said, well, just to be clear we do not want this system. And so I could tell right away this was not going to be a project but thankfully in IST we talked about this we talked about scenarios where things like this could potentially happen in my 440 class with Jim Janssen, one of my favorite classes he once said something that has always stuck with me and I'm paraphrasing here but he said, you can build a great system but if your users don't like it for whatever reason it won't necessarily be successful, right? They may even not use it, they'll find workarounds. And so he always said in order to make sure that the system works for them you need to get to know them you need to understand why they don't like it. And so I decided instead of spending that meeting going through the requirements and kind of forcing them to pick one of these I took his advice and said, listen can I go with you to your lab and watch you work? Can I see what the system looks like to make sure these two are in fact good solutions? And they were surprised because no one had ever been in a lab with them before aside from just fixing technology. But again, IST has taught us that you need to understand who your users are and spend some time with them. And so in that case empathy which I learned in my undergraduate education helped me make sure that I was listening that I was observing and I was actively engaging with my users that I wasn't just taking this list of requirements that they developed in an hour meeting and just kind of pushing a system on them but that we were actually understanding what they were going through. I came to find out that they were kind of racing to get a lot of the data done as one of their big experiments was going through we had a BLA which is a Biological License Agreement kind of like a new drug application for biologics coming up in their study was a critical part of that. And to disrupt their work at this critical time just didn't seem right. And so we came up with a simple solution just by kind of talking through it that we would take their system offline and just allow it to be standalone. I ended up talking to the vendor and it turns out that they were making a new system. It was just underneath a new name so they didn't identify it originally the IT team. And so within a year we were able to get them on that new system which was the software that they did like. Now that was a success story not all of them turn out that way but it shows kind of how just simple empathy really trying to step back and not be the one who thinks we know everything about technology and what's good for our users but allowing them to tell us how technology impacts them. This of course is Beaver Stadium with all of the cutouts because we can't unfortunately be in the stadium together but I put this in here because when I was working with a marketing team on a ADHD pharmaceutical drug we were trying to put together a website that informed the parents as well as the children who had ADHD about different things to do to kind of talk about what they were experiencing in the classroom and in life looking at how different medications could help as well as how other types of environmental factors could help as well. And I walked into my first marketing meeting with this group to help them design this website and there were these cardboard cutouts of people in the chairs and I thought it was so bizarre saying who are these people? And it turns out they were personas a concept that I had never heard about before but it kind of embodies what empathy is in the marketing space and it's something that we have adopted in the design space as well. The purpose of them is sometimes when you're in those meetings making decisions about the design of the website and what we're going to say the different functionality available to these parents and these kids we kind of design it from our own perspective what we think is right based on our expertise but we have to remember who's actually using it and so they were sitting in those seats because marketing said they need a seat at the table they need to be represented when we talk about this and that's a concept that I've carried over into my teaching as well. Sorry, really quick. We're only seeing your- The last one is also something that went a little bit deeper than just kind of kind of getting to know my users it was actually something that helped uncover a critical issue in the system. So this device that this the boy's blowing into is called a spirometer. I had to do a lot of research on what that was when I was supporting them but it's a device that help measures long capacity. We were doing a clinical trial for respiratory medication. Oh, sorry, I'm just gonna pause a second. It sounds like you can't see my screens. Yeah, that's right, we're trying to tell you. Okay, let me try to share again. Can you see this? Okay. Yes, we see a boy blowing into a device. Can you see it? Sorry, I can't hear anyone. Yeah, we can. Yes. I'll open my chat real quick. Yes, okay, thank you so much. Oh, Noah, one of my students is on here. Thanks guys. Okay, so as I was mentioning, thank you again. Please let me know. I'm gonna keep my chat right here in case that happens again. Okay, so the spirometer device, again, I had to come up to speed on what it was. I was helping validate this instrument for clinical trials. Clinical trials were happening in a month. So we had kind of a crunch time. We were working with an excellent vendor and what they had to do during clinical trials is they were on a respiratory drug and we were measuring their lung capacity to see if it would improve. So they would kind of breathe in really deeply and then breathe out as hard as they could and they had to do that three times to kind of be a part of the clinical trial. So we had three data points to work with at different times during the day. And so when we built the test scripts, we kind of just ran through a typical scenario that we do, which is just having them breathe in and out to kind of record the data and just make sure that the report that came out had the three data points and it worked out well. But at night, I was watching a video about people using the spirometers and again, trying to empathize with what exactly these devices are and how they use them and the purpose of them. And I found that a lot of people who were using them, they tended to cough when they were blowing in because clearly they have respiratory issues. So breathing in really hard and breathing out really hard is going to cause them to cough at times. And I thought that's data that's probably going to be, you know, removed from the study analysis because it's something that would be inexempt. So when I went in the next day, I said, I think we need a case study to measure when someone coughs, what happens? Because there's a GCP requirement, a good clinical practice regulatory requirement that says we cannot obscure data, which means that you can't delete data. It always has to be available, but you can mark it as something that's, something like inactive, right? Or something that you're not using as part of your study, typically with a reason as to why. Well, we found when we did the use case scenario that there was a critical issue with the system. The report was not showing that the user ever coughed. When they deleted that specific instance, it just deleted it from the report. So we had a moment of panic where we all looked at each other and said, this is not compliant. And we had to basically call the vendor and thankfully they built the system correctly. So while the data was being housed correctly, it just wasn't being displayed on the report, which again is something that the FDA still requires. And so we were able to come up with a workaround to make sure that we were logging if a user did in fact cough or if they dropped the instrument or if it wasn't calibrated properly, just so that we weren't obscuring that data, but just kind of logging it and putting a note on the report if that data was available in the database. So in this case, it was something that was a little bit more critical than just kind of building rapport with your users. It was really looking at making sure we have realistic testing scenarios so that we can uncover any kind of critical errors in the system. You can see here how empathy really helped drive a lot of what I did in industry and made me realize the importance of what we do as IT professionals. Again, trying to deeply understand the different problems and the realities of these people who we are in fact designing for. After I was in industry for quite some time, I decided I wanted to spend more time looking at this and those that have worked in industry know, sometimes we don't have the time, the budget to be able to spend a lot of time with our users. I couldn't necessarily spend four hours in the lab with my users all the time watching how they worked because we had so many other things going on. And so I decided I wanted to step out after talking with my parents who encouraged me to go back and study this. And so in my research, I also found many instances of empathy, but it was a little different. It focused more on kind of understanding people who were unintentionally excluded from design, which is something that can be quite dangerous in certain fields, especially in healthcare, which is the area I chose to focus in. And so when I was in hospital studying for eight months at a time, I would go in and I would shadow the teams and I'd observe doctors and nurses and lots of other non-clinical users too, like care coordinators and social workers and registration assistants. And I started to realize when I was really trying to stand in their shoes and understand what they were experiencing, they would usually tell you, yeah, the system's fine, when I'd ask them. But as I started to spend more time with them and build rapport with them, they started to open up more about what really frustrated them. And I found that there were a lot of hospital users whose work was actually quite negatively impacted by the system. And these were users that tended to be underrepresented in the research. I had a nurse that once said to me, it literally prevents me from doing my job. So she was supposed to be entering medication but because of how the role-based access control was set up, she just wasn't allowed to do that. And she tried to contact IT about it and they just wouldn't change it. And so it was kind of this back and forth with her and the doctor. It was very frustrating to the two of them that they had to do it in such a haphazard way that kind of went against what they typically did when it was just kind of paper-based or calling in different types of meds to the pharmacy. And so this is something clearly when you start to really see what they experienced and empathize with them, this is not good, right? You don't want to be holding up different kind of medication orders or healthcare decisions because of a system design. When I was also working with the care coordinators it became acutely obvious to me that there were a lot of users kind of neglected from the original design of electronic health records. Clearly doctors should be the focus, they are a major user, but we needed to start to shift towards the other people who tremendously relied on these systems to be able to do what they did. And a care coordinator, most of the time when I say, can you tell me how the system supports you? They would usually kind of laugh and say, oh yeah, it's not really for us, right? It's developed for them, meaning the doctors. And we're just kind of secondary and we just kind of make do. And they showed me these elaborate workarounds that they'd have to do just to get the data or to accomplish the tasks that they needed to do. So again, by empathizing and spending time with them really trying to stand in their shoes and see what they were experiencing, I was able to see a lot of the underrepresented users in the design of our health systems. A smaller study that I was kind of talking to different users about different mobile health apps and health apps. And there were a few women who talked to me about pregnancy apps and they kind of self-identified as lower socioeconomic status. And they said, this is a exciting time in our lives when we're having a baby, but there's so many questions that we need answers to and we can't necessarily afford expensive workshops or books or all this other stuff. And we don't necessarily have the time to really read really long kind of elaborate instructions on what to do. So they turned to mobile health apps because it's something that's in a nice little package and it's easy to access and they can get those bits of information and learn new things every day about their baby. But what we found was in many cases these pregnancy apps had helpful information but they also had information that led to the user's feeling excluded. One user said, half the time these tips are kind of these very expensive things like have a spa day for self-care or buy these really expensive prenatal diamonds or only eat organic food, which is more money. And it wasn't really focused on people who maybe had a very strict budget. And as this woman kind of joke, do they really think expecting moms have this kind of extra money lying around? I certainly don't. So she's clearly stating, I feel like I was kind of excluded from the design of this based on how they're presenting it. And although those tips may be very helpful to others who do have expendable money, they were not for a population that we really do need to access through things like mobile health. Another pregnant woman I was talking to mentioned how helpful she found the app. But what was really disappointing about it was she said the same types of tips that the first woman had mentioned actually started to cause her a lot of anxiety because she started saying, well, if this is what pregnant women have to do to make sure their baby's safe, I don't know if I can afford all this. And her husband kept telling her, no, it's okay. You don't need all these fancy things but it kept causing her stress. And so she ended up just deleting the app even though it was helpful to her because the rest of the information in there caused her stress. So again, this is something that by simple empathy and hearing their stories for a specific set of users that we can understand how unintentionally we might exclude certain people or actually cause them more stress in a critical time during their life, especially when it's dealing with healthcare. So after research, I got the opportunity to teach while I was a graduate student and I completely fell in love with it and decided to stick with teaching instead of going back into industry. And when I was trying to think about how to craft a lot of these classes, which is something we all do as professors, how do we make this relevant to students? How do we engage them with these concepts? I knew I wanted to give them the same experience I had in some of my IST classes, really situate problems and have them experience what it's like to design for different types of users to really empathize, to have this deep understanding. And so when I looked at that in teaching, I came across a framework that I just completely loved. It mimics the system development life cycle of kind of planning, requirements gathering, design development, testing, implement and maintain. But it made it something that was a little bit more focused on the user and allowed for a little bit more creativity than sometimes the rigid structure of the SDLC. And that's the design thinking framework. And some of you are familiar with this. It was developed by the D. School Institute at the design of Stanford at Stanford University. And for those that are not familiar, I'll just briefly walk through the phases and I'll show you some of the tools that I use in the classroom that I think really engage students and teach them a little bit more about empathy. So empathize, which was the first phase, which I loved because that's what I think is so important and something we don't do enough of at the beginning of projects is really trying to learn about your user, caring about them, really trying to say what is their lived experience like and how do these technologies, how do they help them and how do they hinder them in different ways? The defined phase is always a simple one, but if you do empathize correctly, you're gonna be overwhelmed with data about your users. And so what defined does is it helps you focus what you want to really look at, at least for your first iteration of design thinking. And so you create this problem statement that kind of says, this is the space I really wanna look at. So for instance, with pregnancy apps, it could be, I wanna look at women who have lower socioeconomic status and how we can kind of design for them in a way that's more relevant and that empowers them and makes them feel educated and comfortable with their experiences. ID8 is one of my favorite phases. It's something that I think we need more of in the classroom, just creative brainstorming sessions that let students not only come up with conventional kind of feasible ideas, but also kind of these moonshot ideas, right? These big ideas that may seem ridiculous, but as technology advances may become more of a reality. And so IDation is just running them through lots of fun activities to get them to generate ideas. The prototyping phase, this is our technical piece where we teach them how to use different tools to visualize that design, but kind of in a quicker way than actually developing it in writing code so that they can get out there and test it, get some feedback and incorporate that back into the process. So if they find out during testing that their users really liked an idea, they can go ahead and develop a higher fidelity prototype or the full-blown system. Sometimes you may find out that your users don't like your idea, which is completely normal. So you just go right back to ID8 and maybe pick another idea and prototype that out to see if it works. So it's a great process that provides some structure but allows for some flexibility and creativity throughout it. So in the classroom, when we do empathize, just share some of the tools that I use. I always encourage my students to go out and collect data. Now, many students are graded surveys. They like to put them on Instagram or create kind of a Google Forms survey and send it out. And it's easy. They can do it from behind their computer screen, send it out and get some data back. But I usually require them to also go out and do interviews or observations, especially if there's a process or teamwork involved so that they can really experience what the user is going through. And again, that's something that I think is important in entrepreneurship. We call it get out of the building, right? In customer discovery, you can't just figure out how to build a business from behind a screen. You really have to get out and make sure that your customers want something like this. After they gather all that data, we typically do something like an empathy map that makes them really think about the user. And what this does is it takes them out of themselves and it requires them to think like the people they're designing for. So they look at how do they think and feel about different things? What are they seeing in their environment? What are they hearing in their environment? And of course, what are they saying and what are they doing? Which sometimes are completely different. As I always mentioned, sometimes with my research studies, I would find, for instance, doctors or nurses saying, oh, I always log out of my system. I would never leave it open, especially at the nurses station because they have this idea that they are always privacy conscious. But when you actually watch them, they walk away and leave the data revealed for many to see. And again, that's just their practice because they trust the people around them. But it's always important to make sure we look at what they say as well as what they do. After that, we kind of look at what are their pain points? What is most frustrating to them so that we can focus on that as part of our design as well as the type of technology we can use to provide some gains for them to help them? The persona, again, those cardboard cutouts that I saw in that marketing meeting the first day, in this case, it's just a profile. But it shows someone's face. It provides a quote from your research. It gives them demographic data to make them seem like this real person. Now, personas are actually fake profiles. They're not a single real person, but they're based on real data. So we kind of take a look at the data and we build out different types of users to make sure that we're accounting for the different people that can use our app. Again, kind of encouraging diversity of users. In Define, again, my students take their user research and their persona, they put it right in front of them and they say, okay, let's write a succinct statement that clearly defines what the issue is as well as what we're planning on focusing on. In this case, this is from an IST 110 class where I have them pick an existing app and they kind of summarize things that users were saying as well as what they were going to focus their ideation and prototyping on. Ideation is one of my favorites. And the reason I do this is because it never fails every class. The student will come to me and say, we already have our idea. We don't even need to ideate. I say, that's great. Write it down, push it aside and come up with 50 more ideas. Because sometimes what happens is the first idea you come up with is typically something you like and something that you think is really interesting. And that's wonderful and that may be the idea you go with. But other times it's actually not the best idea. It could be combined with other ideas or you may have realized that, oh wow, our idea actually doesn't really address some of the pain points of our users. It's just something that we think is really cool. And you can still do it, but you have to come back to your persona and your problem statement and make sure that you are designing as well for the people that you've chosen to design for. So as Stanford University says their definition of this, it's not about coming up with one right idea. Ideation is your chance to just free brainstorm, to just come up with as many ideas as broad ideas as possible that still address your persona and your problem statement, but lots of different ways of doing that. And I encourage my students to come up with these incremental ideas, these smaller changes that can still have a positive good impact on their users, as well as those moonshot ideas, those crazy ideas that come out there. And some of the activities that we do in class just to give teachers examples of this is day in the life, from 6 a.m. to 12 p.m., I'm sorry, 12 a.m. the night right out their entire day and talk about the different pains they experience and how your technology or your solution could potentially help them. Gamification is kind of making something into a game motivating people, but not just I try and deter students and just giving users points for the sake of giving them points, but really thinking about some kind of habit that they wanna overcome or develop and rewarding them for doing that. And I'll give an example of that in a moment. Convergence is great in technology, especially in IST, because it's about looking at multiple technologies and see if we can push them together. And this has done an industry all the time, Apple developed earbuds that have biosensors on them, biometric sensors on them so that users don't have to wear additional devices when they're running if they wanna measure things like oxygen saturation or blood pressure or their pulse, they can do it through these highly sensitive sensors that are in their ears. We also saw a company take an inhaler and attach a GPS sensor to it so that it could start to collect data on where people were having asthma attacks and see if they could proactively identify environmental factors or triggers that could lead to a future asthma attack and then proactively identify, I'm sorry, notify the user that something might be happening soon. The last one that I'm also really passionate about is designing for disabilities, looking at people who are underrepresented in the disability space and designing solutions for them, which end up quite honestly being very innovative ideas for able to body people as well. For instance, speech to text and text to speech, which is something we use as part of our voice recognition systems with something originally developed for people with disabilities, but it's something we all use on a daily basis as well. After ID8, they pick a couple ideas and they go ahead and prototype them. And we talk about how you can go from this simple, just writing it out on an index card and then building out a mid to high fidelity prototype that requires absolutely no coding. So it's something that looks like something that actually works like an app in this case, but it doesn't require the time to actually code it. And the purpose of that is just to get some feedback so that eventually when you do develop the system, you know exactly the type of design that it should be. And I usually encourage my students, if they want to start simple, especially my non-technical students in my Gen Ed 110 class, just with PowerPoint, they can develop, this one right here was actually developed with PowerPoint, just a simple design. Penn State students very fortunately have access to Adobe XD, which is an excellent software program and then Marvel and Envision are other favorites of students. I wanted to show you a couple examples of student prototypes. In my IST 110 classes mentioned, I kind of give them the freedom to choose an existing app, which everyone they want and then they have to go through design thinking and redesign it. And one of the most favorite apps that many students choose is the Catabus app. This was one that at least a couple of years ago was quite frustrating to many users, I think since it has been upgraded. But they started with some conventional ideas. They, one student had interviewed a friend of his who said, I lost my wallet because I had to take out my wallet to get my pass to swipe it and I ended up not putting my wallet back in fully and it fell out. And so they said, this is a frustration that we have to be paying with things like cards or money and coins, which students, although those of us who are of older generations that that's just normal, that's what we've always done but younger generations, they're not used to that. They're used to digital pay. They're used to things that are a little bit more convenient. And so they merged it with PayPal and said, this would be so much easier. We're waiting in line for the bus. We already have our phone out, we just swipe it. It makes it more efficient and it's easier for us. They also talked about again, meaningful rewards. They mentioned they had interviewed students who at times were always late for the bus and then they ended up missing class and it kind of was this snowball effect and they ended up being kind of non-productive if they ended up missing their bus in the morning. And so what they decided to do was to gamify it to reward them and give them a notification. It heads up to say, get to the bus so that you can get points that you can then cash in for prizes later. And by the way, you'll be productive today because you'll go to class and do the things you're supposed to do. So it was kind of a meaningful use of gamification. Other students, they wanted to look at the creative side of riding a bus and saying, I'm bored on the bus, right? Looking outside, it's a rainy day in state college. I wanna see something else. And so this group just came up with a fun idea to do augmented reality where they could just see a magical forest outside the windows of the bus instead of dreary state college. Many other students said, it is so frustrating when you're standing in line and the bus shows up and it's completely full. And we had no idea that it was full and now we have to either find other transportation or wait for the next bus. And so this group developed a way to embed sensors into the seat so that they could see which ones were available and which ones were taken on the bus. So they would know if it was worth waiting. Other groups also explored this area. They looked at a catacombe to understand capacity. And during the testing, they were actually challenged in this instead, but what about privacy? And this is the part of testing that I also love that students give each other constructive feedback. And so they actually kind of iterated this into more of a heat map where instead of showing people's faces, they just kind of show the outlines of bodies so that it could then be counted, hopefully by some function that was able to do that. They said, you could also just blur out their faces and use some kind of technology to do that. So I liked seeing kind of the progression of these designs as well. One group had a friend who is physically disabled and he couldn't move his arms or his legs very easily. So he's very dependent on others when he's navigating campus. And so this student decided I really wanted to design something for him. And he came up with these smart glasses ideas where he can just give verbal commands and anything that he wants related to the catabus out can appear in his vision. And he's able to quickly find the information he needs, which then reduces his dependency on other people for at least that part of his catabus trip, which I thought was wonderful. And then I had one group who was very excited about this idea. They said we're on the bus and we're hungry. So why don't we merge it with something like Grubhub and be able to order food. But they took it a step further and we had talked about taste technology in class and how it's still very early on in the technology stages. But there are some researchers looking at kind of the different elements of taste and how we can simulate taste using technology. And so they decided they were gonna have a peripheral device that you could plug into your phone and you could stick it on your tongue and you could actually taste test the menu of some of your favorite restaurants before ordering something. And so I loved that they were thinking a little bit outside the box and being more creative about the experience. In the testing phase or final phase before we iterate, we get to throw our designs out there just like these students did and get some feedback on it. So we teach them in class how to create a test packet as well as a usability survey that asks questions that are meaningful to them to collect so that they can make sure that they iterate the design to meet the needs of their users. And I always love watching my students do this in class. I'm always terrified it's gonna be chaotic or something's gonna go wrong. And I teach this in the Cybertorium previously with 155 students. So I literally sat there with my fingers crossed hoping it wasn't mass chaos. And I was so happy to see that they really got into it. Students took the role of test coordinator seriously and they instructed the other users on how to do things and introduce their system and anxiously waited for the feedback and they had these great conversations. As you can see this group here kind of laughing through the design and talking about the creative elements that they built into their systems. So it's always really rewarding. I think for them especially but also very much for me to see that. And so as you can see empathy is kind of this core foundation of all aspects of my industry, my research and my teaching. And what I started to see when I first started teaching this design thinking was students were definitely grasping this idea of empathy but they would start with empathy in the empathize phase but they would always inevitably kind of shift to designing for themselves. Which again is completely normal. It's what we do because we want to explore things that we find really interesting. But as many people know who work as IT professionals most likely we're not designing for ourselves. Usually our users are people who are very different from us. And so I was trying to think about how can I force this a little bit more to make them choose people that they can't relate to. I teach an IST 402 health IT class and so I decided to have them specifically focus on underrepresented users and that they could not relate to directly. And so over the past year in all my 402 classes online and in residence I've asked my students to pick something that is underrepresented some health condition that they really don't know a lot about so that they can not only learn about the health condition but to really force themselves to empathize to design something meaningful. And we had some great designs. There was a group that was so excited. I showed a video in class about dissociative identity disorder which is previously known as multiple personality disorder where you have a person who has multiple alters and they can shift into these different personalities and it's a fascinating kind of disorder that is still quite a mystery to many clinicians. And so they decided to develop an app for these users to say, why don't we have, as you can see in the center kind of the main person as well as all the alters around the edges and when they're kind of exhibiting their alter they can use this app to express themselves and to journal and perhaps that data can be used in different ways by their clinicians to better understand what this disorder is and to make these individuals who have been quoted as saying that they feel like they're crazy they feel like something's wrong with them and most of the time they don't even talk about the fact that they have this disorder. It will make them feel as though they're included in design by having something specifically for them and potentially allowing them to talk to others who have the same condition. We also had a group that was very passionate about vaping addiction. We know a lot about other addictions but vaping addiction is fairly new and so they spent a ton of time really developing this very comprehensive app specifically for people who vape and none of them in the group vape but they had family members or friends who they felt as though were quite addicted to it. And so Jessica Holman who's as you know one of our wonderful marketing communications staff members did an article on my students when we did this as a pilot in my 402 class and I was so proud of the students for recognizing kind of the meaning behind what this project was about. We had one student that said it really helped open my mind to see the people that were not covered by the mainstream media which is exactly what empathy should be about and considering everyone when we're trying to make a difference in design. We had a second student say before the class as I always said to my students most people think health apps are about nutrition and they're about fitness but it goes so much more beyond that. And so she said it made me realize that technology can be used to help people in need and we just need to think outside the box. And to me that's exactly the purpose of empathy is to get outside of yourself and to really try and have that deep understanding of people, their problems and their realities. And so that's kind of my message in the end of my talk just that I think that empathy is really this critical component of developing systems that we think are well-designed and more importantly inclusive for the next generation of IT professionals. Thank you so much and I'm happy to take any questions you have. Thank you very much. That was outstanding. So a round of applause with probably no microphones on. But I think that was excellent. So do people have questions? I know I have a question. So just so you know, I can't hear I don't think I can hear anyone. Uh-oh. Okay, please write any questions in text chat. Oh, there it is. I got it. Now, can you hear? Yes, I can. Okay, perfect. Perfect. Does anybody out there have questions? Let's see if I can, there any hand, you can raise your hand or just type in chat. Well, while we're waiting, I have a question. First of all, thank you very much. And I've taught HCI and experience design for many years and used to run a program. So I'm really familiar with this content and I'm so happy to see it presented and presented in such a visual and compelling way. So thank you very much. My question for you is much of what you focused on in the teaching part of this was how it is that you teach your students to use design thinking to design for others. And I love the story that you told there and I don't have any questions about that. But what I would love to hear you talk about is how you as an instructor use design thinking to design your classes where your students are sort of the end users and your course is the product. I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. So I had considered talking about that too. But I know that this is that when I started making some of my talking points, these are great things that I know previous speakers like Dave and Jeff Hebrace and Steve and Hebrace and previous talks were really trying to understand our users. And I agree with you that the whole empathize when we teach is so important because when I first started teaching, I felt like I was only a couple of years older than the students and then all of a sudden the students started getting much younger than me. I don't know how that happens. But that's how it happens. And I realized I was very disconnected even just with and again, other presenters have mentioned this just kind of material that you're presenting a reference to a movie examples of different things that they're just like, we have no idea what you're talking about. And mentioning Facebook when none of them are on Facebook. So I completely agree that we need to be empathetic when we're teachers and we need to really listen to our students. I think not only to make the class relevant, which is something I do. And one thing just to answer your question I do is in a lot of my classes, I have them fill out a survey during the first to second week of class. And I just ask them questions if they're willing to share things like, if you could just leave school and do one job and have the career of your dreams right now, what would it be? Or what TV show did you just binge watch on Netflix? What's your favorite YouTube channel? Who's your favorite TikTok account or Instagram account? And so by finding some of that information, video games that they're into different apps that they really enjoy, I try and integrate that into the examples that I give in class just to make them realize that this is relevant to what they're doing and what they're learning on a daily basis. And I also think it's important as teachers for us to empathize with students to remember that they have a lot going on. And I think sometimes we forget that. When I was a student, I didn't have to deal with social media. I didn't have to deal with constant emails and phone calls and text messages. And so I've learned through the process of teaching that sometimes we always say, we don't understand why students can't just focus and get the work done. But when you really try and empathize with them, you can see this is why they can't focus and get the work done. To the point that I actually added a internet technology addiction kind of lesson to my IST 110 class to talk to students about that and to get their take on how they view their engagement with technology. So I think those are just little things that I've done. Yeah, that's fascinating. I love the idea of asking these sort of open-ended questions about what they're watching or that sort of thing. I think that's a fantastic idea. So we have a comment from Allison in the chat who just thanked you. This is wonderful information to learn about what is being taught in classes and how our students are responding to this content. So just a plus one there. And it looks like we just got a new chat. Allison can definitely relate for my years in industry. Users felt so disempowered from bad requirements gathering experiences. They constantly said I was wasting their time. So, yeah, maybe you could address the experience of having your needs and requirements extracted from you. Definitely. And I agree with Andy. Andy's one of my wonderful colleagues at Brandywine. Thank you for coming, Andy. I mean, he has extensive experience in industry as well. So he knows this very well. That was something that surprised me in industry that I think a lot of us can relate to that when I learned certain things in the classroom but then when we ended up going and talking to our users, we maybe had like an hour meeting to talk to these R&D scientists about processes that I barely understood every other word that they were saying. And we were kind of creating this laundry list of mostly technical specs, right? So they were mostly around the function of the system and not necessarily the experience of the system or what their goals or frustrations were in their work process itself. And thankfully in industry, I was part of J&J that really encouraged different types of certifications like Process Excellence in Six Sigma and Scrum Agile. So I was able to kind of explore some of these what I would consider like user experience tools to help us map out processes and interview users and really understand that. And I think that that can help, but I agree with Andy that it just continues to happen. And part of me understands why there's budget restrictions and time limitations and these deadlines that approach very quickly. And everyone's got a lot on their plate that you get the list and you just keep moving forward and you don't always have that time to spend with the users. But I think that we need to build that in if we can. Okay, thanks. And sorry, Andy, if I called you by the wrong name, still obviously getting to learn people. I'm still got a raised hand. Noah? Hi, Dr. Murphy. Hi, how are you? I'm well, how are you? Good. So you just touched on how tight timetables and a lack of a budget can sometimes hinder that ability to truly empathize with your users. How have you been able to kind of overcome those challenges in making sure that you still don't cut any corners, whatever corners sometimes others will think they need to be cut? Yeah, it's a great question. Cause I know when I was in industry, you don't have a lot of time. You're bouncing between, you know, five to 10 different projects. But the things that I did was, I think you have to develop a really good rapport with your users. I know I worked at a site and we can all relate to this where I was remote from many of my users. So I would try and travel to their location, although we can't do that now, but just check in with them. And I'd ask them if they wanted to go to lunch and talk about the system or grab coffee. And that was something that's kind of out of, I'm an introvert to the core. So that always makes me nervous, that social anxiety. But I knew I had to do that. And I remember a pivotal moment was, I was walking down the hallway at one of the other sites and I heard one of my users kind of complaining about the system that we were building. And she hadn't mentioned any of this in our meetings. And I decided, do I just leave it or do I go and talk to her about it? And I decided to be brave and go talk to her about it because I knew it might make her feel uncomfortable, but I told her, it's totally okay that you're frustrated with the system. I just need to know. And I think it's moments like that where you can have those hallway conversations or even if you're on Zoom, maybe just popping in and saying, hey, can we chat for five minutes? Just to let your users know, I care about your opinions in this process. And even though we may need to move forward for other reasons, I want to hear what your frustrations are. And I think just that alone lets them know that you're their advocate as opposed to just an IT person that's forcing a system on them. Great question. So good to see you. Yeah, that's really important. Lisa, you had a question. Hi, Allison. Hey, Lisa. One of my wonderful mentors in teaching. Oh, I think I learned more from you than you learned from me. I know that you empathize with your students. I've seen you in the classroom and you've already given some examples today of how you take what you learn from your students, their interests and things and weave that into the content of your course. Given the times that we are living in right now with so much more going on for students, I'm wondering if you can comment on, in addition to adding content to your class, are there structures or technologies or other elements of your teaching that you have modified given where your students are? That's a great question. I think it's something that I'm still trying to learn. And because this has been kind of a transition semester for me, I feel like I haven't had a lot of time to dedicate to it, but I'm really inspired by some of the other things I've seen teachers do. I think there was a great communication teacher who created like a virtual office to allow her students to kind of get to know her better. And I think sometimes thinking creatively like that, in addition to things like polls and breakout rooms, which helps facilitate, but sometimes students don't always engage as much. So unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to see a lot, but I'm excited to see what creative and innovative solutions we do come up with. I know some people had mentioned because we don't have those conversations in the classroom. I will say I'm very lucky with my students at Brandywine. They have been participating really well in the discussions when we have those kind of discussions in class, even if it's just typing, which I've heard from the introverts, they actually prefer than having to kind of speak out loud, but that there's different technologies where you can actually have your slides and people will comment in real time on the slides and you can kind of go through them as you're presenting, which I think would be great, those annotations in real time to let the professor know, aside from having to kind of check the chat and check the presentation, which can be overwhelming to a professor, kind of seeing an integration of that back and forth dialogue. But I'm excited to see some of the creative solutions that come out of this crazy time. Great, thank you. Lynette had a question in the chat. Lynette, do you wanna just ask it out loud or? Oh, I can. Hi, Allison. Hi, Lynette, so good to see you. I wanted to ask what do you do with students who might hear this empathy thing and think it's not valuable? Yeah, that definitely exists. I see that a lot in the class and it can be really demotivating, especially for a teacher. I think one of the best ways that I've tried to address it and sometimes you can't always reach every student, you hope that they're gonna see it at some point, just maybe not in your class, is really trying to provide a lot of examples. So in healthcare, showing how there's a certain group that's been neglected or a certain race or ethnicity where design is not, they're unintentionally excluded from it and how it can lead to just this clear, like missing element for them, that they're excluded from some experience or some opportunity and hope that that connects with them. And so I try and share some of those examples in class just so they can see, especially if they are someone who is typically the target of a lot of the design, if they're male and white, that tends to be who our designers and our developers and our testers are. And although they don't intentionally try and exclude people, they build for what they know. And so they don't always see that they're unintentionally excluding other people. And I think sometimes by trying to have that conversation in a way that encourages discussion and encourages them to see the ways in which people might have been excluded or the ways in which design could be really helpful for certain groups that might even be niche, kind of smaller groups, but the impact it can have on them. I think those examples can help. But again, it's hard to reach every student, they may not see it, but I just hope that at some point, they will realize the importance of doing that. Thank you, yeah, that's a really, I've dealt with that topic too. So thank you for that answer. I'm not seeing other questions and I have another question that I'm actually really curious to hear your thoughts on. One of the things that I like about the Stanford D-School framework, not just that it tends to be a process that a lot of people, not just really hardcore trained designers, but a lot of people can follow and generate pretty decent products and pretty decent product ideas. But another benefit of it, which you haven't touched on, that I think is really important is it also produces really good documentation of a design process and where the design ideas came from. And that can be very important in an organizational setting so that you're not sort of suggesting that design is the black box or that the design is some noble artist who lives in a different genius realm, et cetera. And what I'd like to do is again, bring that back to teaching. Have you used any of the documentation that comes with these approaches to help you create representations of your teaching? Your teaching achievements or your teaching methods that might help render visible some of your pedagogical tactics to others to help again, improve us as a learning community? That's a great question. Yeah, it's something that I agree with. It does provide documentation. It's funny, I always tell my students that because they, at the end of the design thinking they have to write a memo to the original app company telling them the feedback that they've heard and providing that documentation and providing the test results, providing the research that they did so that the company understands that they're coming from a place of really doing the work and not just suggesting a random idea. When it comes to teaching, I think that the biggest tool that I always love is the persona and that's something that's helped me. When I take a look at my students and I look at, for instance, the content that I give them, the articles that they're reading, the tech talks that they're watching, the textbooks that they're reading and understanding that sometimes those materials are very geared towards a certain group of students but that there are other students that may not connect to that. And as a woman in technology, I always try and make sure I'm emphasizing some of the incredible women who've contributed to technology but there are other groups of people, whether it's personality type or military experience or sexual orientation, all these diversity factors, race and ethnicity that we need to make sure are represented and I think sometimes when we look at how we design and even looking at the apps that students choose and the personas that they create are giving me insight into who they see as the user and who they are as IT professionals and how I need to adjust my teaching to make sure that we're also highlighting the people who I'm not seeing in the personas and who I'm not seeing any ideas. I hope that helps answer that a little bit. It does, yeah, absolutely, yeah, I love that. We have another question from Tiffany. Do you wanna ask it yourself? Yeah, sure, so hi everyone, my name is Tiffany. I know some of you all. I will be a grad teaching fellow starting this spring and this will be the first time I've ever actually taught a course on my own. So I'm wondering what advice you can give to first-time teachers in order to make the transition from being a TA to being the actual instructor a little bit smoother. Congratulations on teaching your first class, that's exciting. That's where I got my first teaching experience too when I was a grad student at IST. I think that the best advice, I mean, at least for me, I'm a type A is to prepare, to really make sure that you feel prepared because then when you walk in there it alleviates some of those nerves. I'll also tell you something Lisa Lenz had told me, I remember as a teaching assistant I said to her, but what if I don't know the answer to like a question that they ask or if I'm teaching content and I'm like, I kinda know this, but maybe there's a student in the class that knows this even better. And she, Lisa said to me, just be confident, you know this stuff. And so that's what I would say, you know this stuff. And even if you don't, I know the first time students ask me questions, you know, you kinda just wanna shut it down because you don't wanna show them that you don't know the answers. And I've come to learn, we need to empower them to ask questions that we don't know the answers to, right? We wanna encourage them to ask those questions and that's some advice that I give you to, to not be afraid of not knowing and to kind of shift it, right? That flip classroom approach of saying, you know, that's something that I haven't looked at recently. It's not something I've seen. Why don't we go online and take a look at what it is and let's talk about what the answer to that question is. So, and that sometimes happens with your comfortableness in teaching, but I think preparedness and just being confident that you know the material that you're teaching and just trying to connect with the students when they do reach out and ask you questions. Okay, yeah, that's great advice to you. Okay, well it's one o'clock, so we need to wrap this up. I apologize, I know there was one other question Noah, perhaps you can ask after this or via email, but why don't we just take a moment to thank our speaker? I think that was just outstanding, went really well. Congratulations on this event and on the award, certainly well-deserved. Thank you very much. And thank you all for coming and we'll see you well next year, but hopefully a little bit sooner than that also. Yes, it was great to see everyone. Thank you so much for coming. Bye-bye. Bye, thank you again, Jeff, I really appreciate it. Oh, my pleasure, this is fun. Thanks Allison, great job. Thanks so much Pam, it was good to see you. You too, take care. Bye-bye.