The construction industry in Japan, one of the most male-dominant industries has been suffering from discontinuation of the employees, especially women civil engineers, and started preparing strategies which are not fully utilized. The authors proposed a human-centered design approach that employs interview, persona and scenario to derive measures which suit employees’ needs, along with a learning program to help company personnel conduct surveys and analysis so that they can revise the measures by themselves in a timely manner. A case study was conducted at a leading construction consulting firm of approximately 1,400 employees. With assistance of researchers, eleven interviews were conducted and analyzed by the personnel. Analysis derived three personas and scenarios of typical employees who face difficulty in continuing their works. Fifty-three including 36 new measures were derived to solve 36 groups of problems. Results proved that the approach was effective in deriving measures, and the program implemented in this case study was also effective for the personnel to obtain these results. However the uniformity of the interview methods such as the usages of the interview form, interviewers’ attitudes towards interviewees and estimation of the effectiveness of measures prior to their actual implementation are remained to be discussed.

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Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a better way of creating highly usable software. However, poor quality software continues to be produced as a few practical difficulties make it difficult to apply HCD. This paper introduces an HCD case study of smartphone app development to elucidate these difficulties. Three features of this case study emphasize HCD issues: 1. Many stakeholders are related to this project, 2. Short-term development, 3. HCD practitioner joined as an external advisor. We mainly discuss the effective- ness of HCD and its difficulties in terms of documentation and communication. We clarify the importance of support in quickly reaching human centered decisions; A. Grasping the sharing status of HCD documents, and B. Bridging communication among stakeholders by visual aids.

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The education program working group (Education Program WG) of HCD-Net has collected several examples of training program on HCD, and the member of WG are discussing what the effective HCD training courses are, and/or how to foster members who can utilize the techniques and methods of HCD. In this report, we report the results of evaluation on the action plans with the road-map called ‘Makimono,’ and propose a framework available for the persons who are in charge of education and promotion on HCD.

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