Hurdle Relay: A Participatory Design Method for Understanding the Information Gap Through Iterative Comparison

Abstract

Some perceive poorer quality of information (i.e., information-poor) than others (i.e., information-rich) depending on diverse physical and social barriers. The unevenness of information experience is referred to as information gap. It is core to figure out the features that create such differences for researchers to understand the uneven experiences. The aim of our method is to help designers address the gap features: components of information gap such as clothes fabric or size in online-shopping. While few studies in HCI community attempted to identify the gap features, existing studies are often limited to exploration of gaps. We suggest Hurdle Relay, a method not only to identify the gap features but also to further understand how and why these gap features create different experiences. Hurdle Relay has two key concepts: role-switching of information-rich, and iterative comparison through a relay. We conducted a study on a movie captioning project for hearing-impaired as the case information gap is experienced. The study result showed that the researchers can use Hurdle Relay method to compare the features appearing/disappearing through a relay and understand the subjective gap features. We conclude by discussing the implications of our method for HCI designers.