Younger generations play essential roles in the consumer markets. Therefore, knowing their awareness of good and poor user experiences (UXs) is significant to provide appropriate services, systems, or products. The simple survey to disclose students’ knowledge of the user experience was conducted at the end of the year 2019. This paper describes an overview of the investigation and its results. The analysis of the study will not only be used to grab the tendency of the students’ considerations on UX but also helpful for every designer who plans to deliver some services or products for the younger generations.

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More user-focused research is conducted in the commissioned projects of construction consultants and discussed in academia. However, user research methods are not taught to civil engineering students and engineers. The authors aimed to produce a user research manual for a construction consultant, which helps the company personnel conduct their duties. In this paper, we introduce the development of seven personas categorized with their user research duties. It was found that the research team members, civil engineers, understood the personas without education and validated and helped authors define the manual’s specifications. The effectiveness of the personas shall be evaluated after the launch of the manual. The pros and cons of personas without a name or a photo and personas’ gender balance in a male-dominant industry remain for discussion.

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Design thinking is a measure to enable human-centered policy design. METI, PA, and MEXT have released declarations and guidelines on design thinking, human-centered design, and service design. However, the authors could not find such training courses in the last five years at Hokkaido Regional Development Bureau of the MLIT who handles national land and infrastructure management. The authors conducted an employees’ training course on design thinking at Hokkaido MLIT, where trainees find problems and solutions at Tobetsu Town following the design thinking approach. The achievements include improving ideas being more human-centered than pre-course assignment, high recommendation rates, and enhancing trainees’ capabilities, especially in pushing forward the projects and listening.

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This research was focused on the relationships between users' feelings of annoyance and the online video advertising methods where some video advertisements (ads) with different formats usually were played before, between, or after the main content. The ads, however, sometimes annoyed users. The purpose of this research was to examine through the experiments what inserted positions and inserted formats for the ads could avoid user annoyance. The experiments were designed by a 2 x 3 within-subjects factorial design with independent variables: inserted position (the pre-roll or the mid-roll) and inserted formats (the 6 seconds bumper ad, the skippable instream ad after 5 seconds, or the un-skippable 15 seconds instream ad). The results of experiments revealed the bumper ad and the skippable instream ad were less annoying than the un-skippable instream one regardless of the inserted position. It was also suggested that the combination of the bumper ad and the skippable instream ad were recommended to avoid user annoyance as a combination of pre-roll and mid-roll ads.

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In this paper, we examined the inevitable problem in establishing a method of “systematic review” in human-centered design research: how to recognize that a design case incorporates the process of human-centered design. In this paper, systematic review is a research method that aims to create new knowledge that practitioners themselves are not aware of by collecting and integrating case reports related to human-centered design and clarifying the differences and commonalities among the cases. It is important to extract and analyze reliable cases for systematic review. However, if the collection of cases to be reviewed is done inappropriately, the reliability of the findings may be impaired. Therefore, the author points out that in conducting a systematic review in human-centered design research, it is necessary to establish clear criteria for “how to approve the cases of human centered design to be studied in the systematic review.” This paper presents three directions of criteria for case selection and discusses the merits and demerits of each.

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