While social media data is a valuable source for inferring human behavior, its in-practice utility hinges on extraneous factors. Notable is the “observer effect,” where awareness of being monitored can alter people’s social media use. We present a causal-inference study to examine this phenomenon on the longitudinal Facebook use of 300+ participants who voluntarily shared their data spanning an average of 82 months before and 5 months after study enrollment. We measured deviation from participants’ expected social media use through time series analyses. Individuals with high cognitive ability and low neuroticism decreased posting immediately after enrollment, and those with high openness increased posting. The sharing of self-focused content decreased, while diverse topics emerged. We situate the findings within theories of self-presentation and self-consciousness. We discuss the implications of correcting observer effect in social media data-driven measurements, and how this phenomenon shines light on the ethics of these measurements.

Social media platforms are frequently used to share information and opinions around vaccinations. The more often a message is reshared, the wider the reach of the message and potential influence it may have on shaping people’s opinions to get vaccinated or not. We used a negative binomial regression to investigate whether a message’s linguistic characteristics (degree of concreteness, emotional arousal, and sentiment) and user characteristics (political ideology and number of followers) may influence users’ decisions to reshare tweets related to the COVID-19 vaccine. We analyzed US English-language tweets related to the COVID-19 vaccine between May 2020 and October 2021 ( N = 236,054). Tweets with positive and high-arousal words were more often retweeted than negative, low-arousal tweets. Tweets with abstract words were more often retweeted than tweets with concrete words. In addition, while Liberal users were more likely to have tweets with a positive sentiment reshared. Conservative users were more likely to have tweets with a negative sentiment reshared. Our results can inform public health messaging on how to best phrase vaccine information to impact engagement and information resharing, and potentially persuade a wider set of people to get vaccinated.

Much emphasis has been placed on how the affordances and layouts of an office setting can influence co-worker interactions and perceived team outcomes. Little is known, however, whether perceptions of teamwork and team conflict are affected when the location of work changes from the office to the home. To address this gap, we present findings from a ten-week,in situ study of 91 information workers from 27 US-based teams. We compare three distinct work locations---private and shared workspaces at home as well at the office---and explore how each location may impact individual perceptions of teamwork. While there was no significant association with participants' perceptions of teamwork, results revealed associations of work location with team conflict: participants who worked in a private room at home reported significantly lower team conflict compared to those working in the office. No difference was found for the office and the shared workspace. We further found that the influence of work location on team conflict interacted with job decision latitude and the level of task interdependence among co-workers. We discuss practical implications for full-time work from home (WFH) on teams. Our study adds an important environmental dimension to the literature on remote teaming, which in turn may help organizations as they consider, prepare, or implement more permanent WFH and/or hybrid work policies in the future.

Although some research highlights the benefits of behavioral routines for individual functioning, other research indicates that routines can reflect an individual's inflexibility and lower well-being. Given conflicting accounts on the benefits of routine, research is needed to examine how routineness versus flexibility in health-related behaviors correspond to personality traits, health, and occupational outcomes. We adopt a nonlinear dynamical systems approach to understanding routine using automatically sensed health-related behaviors collected from 483 information workers over a roughly two-month period. We utilized multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis to derive a measure of health regularity (routineness) from measures of daily step count, sleep duration, and heart rate variability (which relates to stress). Participants also completed measures of personality, health, and job performance at the start of the study and for two months via Ecological Momentary Assessments. Greater regularity was associated with higher neuroticism, lower agreeableness, and greater interpersonal and organizational deviance. Importantly, these results were independent of overall levels of each health indicator in addition to demographics. It is often believed that routine is desirable, but the results suggest that associations with routineness are more nuanced, and wearable sensors can provide insights into beneficial health behaviors.

The coronavirus pandemic has significantly disrupted information work across the globe. Since March 2020 when the World Health Organization designated Covid-19 as a pandemic, workplaces across the ...

Working from home has become common practice for many, especially since the global pandemic has forced many office workers to relocate their work spaces to a home environment. While working from home can have benefits, it requires self-discipline and can be a challenge to stay motivated. Changes in motivation about work may impact people's sense of productivity and well-being. We used a mixed-methods study using diaries and interviews with 25 informants to investigate perceived challenges during remote work from home. A grounded theory analysis revealed that people's work motivation had shifted from being people-centric to being work-centric. In the office, informants were motivated by working and interacting with others and being at their desk signaled work engagement to others. At home, motivation was mainly driven by personal work responsibilities. We identify four clusters of worker strategies to address the shift in work motivation. While some informants' perspectives on motivation made them reflect inward on their work performance and enjoyment, other informants' perspectives were outward-facing and involved performance and enjoyment in relation to others. We conclude that there needs to be better support for sustaining work motivation at home that can be tailored to different individuals, specifically in terms of managing time and detaching from work. We conclude by considering new pathways for supporting remote work.

Working remotely from home during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant shifts and disruptions in the personal and work lives of millions of information workers and their teams. We examined how sleep patterns---an important component of mental and physical health---relates to teamwork. We used wearable sensing and daily questionnaires to examine sleep patterns, affect, and perceptions of teamwork in 71 information workers from 22 teams over a ten-week period. Participants reported delays in sleep onset and offset as well as longer sleep duration during the pandemic. A similar shift was found in work schedules, though total work hours did not change significantly. Surprisingly, we found that more sleep was negatively related to positive affect, perceptions of teamwork, and perceptions of team productivity. However, a greater misalignment in the sleep patterns of members in a team predicted positive affect and teamwork after accounting for individual differences in sleep preferences. A follow-up analysis of exit interviews with participants revealed team-working conventions and collaborative mindsets as prominent themes that might help explain some of the ways that misalignment in sleep can affect teamwork. We discuss implications of sleep and sleep misalignment in work-from-home contexts with an eye towards leveraging sleep data to facilitate remote teamwork.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of previously co-located information workers had to work from home, a trend expected to become much more commonplace in the future. We interviewed 53 information workers from 17 U.S. teams to understand how this unique extended work-from-home setting influenced teamwork and how they adapted to it. Using a grounded theory approach, we discovered that extended remote work highlighted diversity in team members' home-lives and daily work rhythms. Whereas these types of diversity played only marginal roles for teams in the co-located office, they had a more tangible impact in the work-from-home setting, from coordination delays and interruptions to conflicts related to workload fairness, miscommunication, and trust. Importantly, workers reported that their teams adapted to these challenges by setting explicit norms and standards for online communication and asynchronous collaboration and by promoting general social and situational awareness. We discuss computer-supported designs to help teams manage these latent diversities in an extended remote teamwork setting.

We present a design fiction, which is set in the near future as significant Mars habitation begins. Our goal in creating this fiction is to address current work-life issues on Earth and Mars in the future. With shelter-in-place measures, established norms of productivity and relaxation have been shaken. The fiction creates an opportunity to explore boundaries between work and life, which are changing with shelter-in-place and will continue to change. Our work includes two primary artifacts: (1) a propaganda recruitment poster and (2) a fictional narrative account. The former paints the work-life on Mars as heroic, fulfilling, and fun. The latter provides a contrast that depicts the lived experience of early Mars inhabitants. Our statement draws from our design fiction in order to reflect on the structure of work, stress identification and management, family and work-family communication, and the role of automation.

Social media platforms continue to evolve as archival platforms, where important milestones in an individual’s life are socially disclosed for support, solidarity, maintaining and gaining social capital, or to meet therapeutic needs. However, a limited understanding of how and what life events are disclosed (or not) prevents designing platforms to be sensitive to life events. We ask what life events individuals disclose on a 256 participants’ year-long Facebook dataset of 14K posts against their self-reported life events. We contribute a codebook to identify life event disclosures and build regression models on factors explaining life events’ disclosures. Positive and anticipated events are more likely, whereas significant, recent, and intimate events are less likely to be disclosed on social media. While all life events may not be disclosed, online disclosures can reflect complementary information to self-reports. Our work bears practical and platform design implications in providing support and sensitivity to life events.

Mathematical models and expressions traditionally evolved as symbolic representations, with cognitively arbitrary rules of symbol manipulation. The embodied mathematics philosophy posits that abstract math concepts are layers of metaphors grounded in our intuitive arithmetic capabilities, such as categorizing objects and part-whole analysis. We introduce a design framework that facilitates the construction and exploration of embodied representations for algebraic expressions, using interactions inspired by innate arithmetic capabilities. We instantiated our design in a sketch interface that enables construction of visually interpretable compositions that are directly mappable to algebraic expressions and explorable through a ladder of abstraction [47]. The emphasis is on bottom-up construction, with the user sketching pictures while the system generates corresponding algebra. We present diverse examples created by our prototype system. A coverage of the US Common Core curriculum and playtesting studies with children point to the future direction and potential for a sketch-based design paradigm for mathematics.

OBJECTIVES: Electronic health record systems are increasingly used to send messages to physicians, but research on physicians' inbox use patterns is limited. This study's aims were to (1) quantify the time primary care physicians (PCPs) spend managing inboxes; (2) describe daily patterns of inbox use; (3) investigate which types of messages consume the most time; and (4) identify factors associated with inbox work duration. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We analyzed 1 month of electronic inbox data for 1275 PCPs in a large medical group and linked these data with physicians' demographic data. RESULTS: PCPs spent an average of 52 minutes on inbox management on workdays, including 19 minutes (37%) outside work hours. Temporal patterns of electronic inbox use differed from other EHR functions such as charting. Patient-initiated messages (28%) and results (29%) accounted for the most inbox work time. PCPs with higher inbox work duration were more likely to be female (P < .001), have more patient encounters (P < .001), have older patients (P < .001), spend proportionally more time on patient messages (P < .001), and spend more time per message (P < .001). Compared with PCPs with the lowest duration of time on inbox work, PCPs with the highest duration had more message views per workday (200 vs 109; P < .001) and spent more time on the inbox outside work hours (30 minutes vs 9.7 minutes; P < .001). CONCLUSIONS: Electronic inbox work by PCPs requires roughly an hour per workday, much of which occurs outside scheduled work hours. Interventions to assist PCPs in handling patient-initiated messages and results may help alleviate inbox workload.

This work presents a baseline for remotely monitoring patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), on an everyday's life basis, using distributed tangible tabletops. Our proposed system aims to help individuals with AD live at home independently of physical presence of caregivers, nurses, and/or family members, since these latter can assist the patients with AD and monitor their activity through a virtually duplicated (dual reality) environment. This monitoring happens in real time, and monitors can encourage and remind patients with AD to take actions, while respecting their privacy. The interaction is achieved by moving physical (tangible) and/or virtual (digital) objects on the tabletop's surface, or by displaying messages and reminders on its surface. A first prototype is described and illustrated, as well as propositions to validate and extend the system.

Working in an environment with constant interruptions is known to affect stress, but how do interruptions affect emotional expression? Emotional expression can have significant impact on interactions among coworkers. We analyzed the video of 26 participants who performed an essay task in a laboratory while receiving either continual email interruptions or receiving a single batch of email. Facial videos of the participants were run through a convolutional neural network to determine the emotional mix via decoding of facial expressions. Using a novel co-occurrence matrix analysis, we showed that with batched email, a neutral emotional state is dominant with sadness being a distant second, and with continual interruptions, this pattern is reversed, and sadness is mixed with fear. We discuss the implications of these results for how interruptions can impact employees' well-being and organizational climate.

The rise of increasingly more powerful chatbots offers a new way to collect information through conversational surveys, where a chatbot asks open-ended questions, interprets a user’s free-text responses, and probes answers whenever needed. To investigate the effectiveness and limitations of such a chatbot in conducting surveys, we conducted a field study involving about 600 participants. In this study with mostly open-ended questions, half of the participants took a typical online survey on Qualtrics and the other half interacted with an AI-powered chatbot to complete a conversational survey. Our detailed analysis of over 5,200 free-text responses revealed that the chatbot drove a significantly higher level of participant engagement and elicited significantly better quality responses measured by Gricean Maxims in terms of their informativeness, relevance, specificity, and clarity. Based on our results, we discuss design implications for creating AI-powered chatbots to conduct effective surveys and beyond.

Conversational agents have the potential to support users in many tasks. However, support for productivity and well-being in the workplace has received little attention. We present the first design of a conversational system that supports information workers with multiple work-related goals, informed by a survey of the current and potential use of conversational agents in the workplace. The goals of this research include the evaluation of using an agent for scheduling and prioritizing tasks, switching tasks, providing break reminders, dealing with social media distractions and for end of the day reflection on tasks accomplished. We deployed a chat-based intelligent agent, named Amber, in a field study with 24 information workers over the course of 6 days. We present our preliminary findings from the field study and discuss implications for the design of future workplace conversational agents.

The ubiquitous use of social media enables researchers to obtain self-recorded longitudinal data of individuals in real-time. Because this data can be collected in an inexpensive and unobtrusive way at scale, social media has been adopted as a “passive sensor” to study human behavior. However, such research is impacted by the lack of homogeneity in the use of social media, and the engineering challenges in obtaining such data. This paper proposes a statistical framework to leverage the potential of social media in sensing studies of human behavior, while navigating the challenges associated with its sparsity. Our framework is situated in a large-scale in-situ study concerning the passive assessment of psychological constructs of 757 information workers wherein of four sensing streams was deployed - bluetooth beacons, wearable, smartphone, and social media. Our framework includes principled feature transformation and machine learning models that predict latent social media features from the other passive sensors. We demonstrate the efficacy of this imputation framework via a high correlation of 0.78 between actual and imputed social media features. With the imputed features we test and validate predictions on psychological constructs like personality traits and affect. We find that adding the social media data streams, in their imputed form, improves the prediction of these measures. We discuss how our framework can be valuable in multimodal sensing studies that aim to gather comprehensive signals about an individual's state or situation.

Workplace environments are characterized by frequent interruptions that can lead to stress. However, measures of stress due to interruptions are typically obtained through self-reports, which can be affected by memory and emotional biases. In this paper, we use a thermal imaging system to obtain objective measures of stress and investigate personality differences in contexts of high and low interruptions. Since a major source of workplace interruptions is email, we studied 63 participants while multitasking in a controlled office environment with two different email contexts: managing email in batch mode or with frequent interruptions. We discovered that people who score high in Neuroticism are significantly more stressed in batching environments than those low in Neuroticism. People who are more stressed finish emails faster. Last, using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count on the email text, we find that higher stressed people in multitasking environments use more anger in their emails. These findings help to disambiguate prior conflicting results on email batching and stress.

Crowdworkers regularly support their work with scripts, extensions, and software to enhance their productivity. Despite their evident significance, little is understood regarding how these tools affect crowdworkers' quality of life and work. In this study, we report findings from an interview study (N=21) aimed at exploring the tooling practices used by full-time crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our interview data suggests that the tooling utilized by crowdworkers (1) strongly contributes to the fragmentation of microwork by enabling task switching and multitasking behavior; (2) promotes the fragmentation of crowdworkers' work-life boundaries by relying on tooling that encourages a 'work-anywhere' attitude; and (3) aids the fragmentation of social ties within worker communities through limited tooling access. Our findings have implications for building systems that unify crowdworkers' work practice in support of their productivity and well-being.

We present artificial intelligent (AI) agents that act as interviewers to engage with a user in a text-based conversation and automatically infer the user's personality traits. We investigate how the personality of an AI interviewer and the inferred personality of a user influences the user's trust in the AI interviewer from two perspectives: the user's willingness to confide in and listen to an AI interviewer. We have developed two AI interviewers with distinct personalities and deployed them in a series of real-world events. We present findings from four such deployments involving 1,280 users, including 606 actual job applicants. Notably, users are more willing to confide in and listen to an AI interviewer with a serious, assertive personality in a high-stakes job interview. Moreover, users’ personality traits, inferred from their chat text, along with interview context, influence their perception of and their willingness to confide in and listen to an AI interviewer. Finally, we discuss the design implications of our work on building hyper-personalized, intelligent agents.

Information workers are experiencing ever-increasing online distractions in the workplace, and software to block distractions is becoming more popular. We conducted an exploratory field study with 32 information workers in their workplace using software to block online distractions for one week. We discovered that with online distractions blocked, participants assessed their focus and productivity to be significantly higher. Those who benefited most were those who reported being less in control of their work, associated with personality traits of lower Conscientiousness and Lack of Perseverence. Unexpectedly, those reporting higher control of work experienced a cost of higher workload with online distractions blocked. Those who reported the greatest increase in focus with distractions blocked were those who were more susceptible to social media distractions. Without distractions, people with higher control of work worked longer stretches without physical breaks, with consequently higher stress. We present design recommendations to promote focus for our observed coping behaviors.

Mental health disorders are a leading cause of disability worldwide. Although evidence-based psychotherapy is effective, engagement from such programs can be low. Mobile apps have the potential to help engage and support people in their therapy. We developed Pocket Skills, a mobile web app based on Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). Pocket Skills teaches DBT via a conversational agent modeled on Marsha Linehan, who developed DBT. We examined the feasibility of Pocket Skills in a 4-week field study with 73 individuals enrolled in psychotherapy. After the study, participants reported decreased depression and anxiety and increased DBT skills use. We present a model based on qualitative findings of how Pocket Skills supported DBT. Pocket Skills helped participants engage in their DBT and practice and implement skills in their environmental context, which enabled them to see the results of using their DBT skills and increase their self-efficacy. We discuss the design implications of these findings for future mobile mental health systems.

The effects of Facebook on academic performance have attracted both public and scholarly attention. Prior research found that Facebook use is linked to poor academic performance, suggesting that Facebook distracts students from studying. These studies, which are primarily based on survey responses, are insufficient to uncover exactly how Facebook is used or embedded in students' studying activities. To capture unbiased, detailed use patterns and to investigate the context of Facebook use, we studied 50 college students using automatic logging and experience sampling. We analyzed the activities and attentional states of students prior to visiting Facebook. Results show that GPAs of frequent Facebook users do not suffer. Students with high GPAs spend shorter time in each Facebook session and shorter Facebook use often follows schoolwork. These results point to a possibility that potentially problematic Facebook use occurs when students are in a spree of leisure activities, not while studying.

Research has shown that productivity is mediated by an individual's ability to detach from their work at the end of the day and reattach with it when they return the next day. In this paper we explore the extent to which structured dialogues, focused on individuals' work-related tasks or emotions, can help them with the detachment and reattachment processes. Our inquiry is driven with SwitchBot, a conversational bot which engages with workers at the start and end of their work day. After preliminarily validating the design of a detachment and reattachment dialogue frame-work with 108 crowdworkers, we study SwitchBot's use in-situ for 14 days with 34 information workers. We find that workers send fewer e-mails after work hours and spend a larger percentage of their first hour at work using productivity applications than they normally would when using SwitchBot. Further, we find that productivity gains were better sustained when conversations focused on work-related emotions. Our results suggest that conversational bots can be effective tools for aiding workplace detachment and reattachment and help people make successful use of their time on and off the job.

Analysis of casual chit-chat indicates that differences in conversational style---the way things are said---can significantly impact a participants» impressions of the conversation and of each other. However, prior work has not systematically analyzed how important style is in task-oriented, information-seeking exchanges of the sort we might have with a conversational search agent. We examine recordings from the MISC data set, where pairs of "users" and "intermediaries" collaborate on information-seeking tasks, and look for indications of style which can be computed at scale. We find that stylistic markers identified by Tannen in casual chat do exist in information-seeking dialogue, and that participants can be arranged along a single stylistic dimension: "considerate" to "involved". This labelling for style needs no manual intervention. Furthermore, we find that there is no clear best style; but that differences in style, previously thought to impede communication, are only a problem for shorter tasks. This result is likely due to alignment of conversational style over the course of an interaction.

Linguistic style and affect shape how users perceive and assess political content on social media. Using linguistic methods to compare political discourse on far-left, mainstream and alt-right news articles covering the #MeToo movement, we reveal rhetorical similarities and differences in commenting behavior across the political spectrum. We employed natural language processing techniques and qualitative methods on a corpus of approximately 30,000 Facebook comments from three politically distinct news publishers. Our findings show that commenting behavior reflects how social movements are framed and understood within a particular political orientation. Surprisingly, these data reveal that the structural patterns of discourse among commenters from the two alternative news sites are similar in terms of their relationship to those from the mainstream - exhibiting polarization, generalization, and othering of perspectives in political conversation. These data have implications for understanding the possibility for civil discourse in online venues and the role of commenting behavior in polarizing media sources in undermining such discourse.

College students are exposed to a vast amount of information on political and social issues through social media. We studied how college students engage with political and social issues on Facebook in a weeklong study with 50 participants using diary entries and interviews. The interviews revealed a duality of benefits for using Facebook for news and they also revealed challenges of self-presentation around news. Benefits included gaining multiple perspectives and enabling social sense making, providing personal relevance and convenience of access, and the opportunity for social engagement. Impression management and disclosure concerns strongly influence some people to refrain from commenting or sharing news. We discuss the challenges that context collapse poses for Facebook news readers. We suggest design ideas and future directions to encourage more balanced participation with news among college students.

We present an intelligent virtual interviewer that engages with a user in a text-based conversation and automatically infers the user's psychological traits, such as personality. We investigate how the personality of a virtual interviewer influences a user's behavior from two perspectives: the user's willingness to confide in, and listen to, a virtual interviewer. We have developed two virtual interviewers with distinct personalities and deployed them in a real-world recruiting event. We present findings from completed interviews with 316 actual job applicants. Notably, users are more willing to confide in and listen to a virtual interviewer with a serious, assertive personality. Moreover, users' personality traits, inferred from their chat text, influence their perception of a virtual interviewer, and their willingness to confide in and listen to a virtual interviewer. Finally, we discuss the implications of our work on building hyper- personalized, intelligent agents based on user traits.

In HCI research, attention has focused on understanding external influences on workplace multitasking. We explore instead how multitasking might be influenced by individual factors: personality, stress, and sleep. Forty information workers' online activity was tracked over two work weeks. The median duration of online screen focus was 40 seconds. The personality trait of Neuroticism was associated with shorter online focus duration and Impulsivity-Urgency was associated with longer online focus duration. Stress and sleep duration showed trends to be inversely associated with online focus. Shorter focus duration was associated with lower assessed productivity at day's end. Factor analysis revealed a factor of lack of control which significantly predicts multitasking. Our results suggest that there could be a trait for distractibility where some individuals are susceptible to online attention shifting in the workplace. Our results have implications for information systems (e.g. educational systems, game design) where attention focus is key.

While email provides numerous benefits in the workplace, it is unclear how patterns of email use might affect key workplace indicators of productivity and stress. We investigate how three email use patterns: duration, interruption habit, and batching, relate to perceived workplace productivity and stress. We tracked email usage with computer logging, biosensors and daily surveys for 40 information workers in their in situ workplace environments for 12 workdays. We found that the longer daily time spent on email, the lower was perceived productivity and the higher the measured stress. People who primarily check email through self-interruptions report higher productivity with longer email duration compared to those who rely on notifications. Batching email is associated with higher rated productivity with longer email duration, but despite widespread claims, we found no evidence that batching email leads to lower stress. We discuss the implications of our results for improving organizational email practices.

The amount of sleep college students receive has become a pressing societal concern. While studies show that information technology (IT) use affects sleep, here we examine the converse: how sleep duration might affect IT use. We conducted an in situ study, and logged computer and phone use and collected sleep diaries and daily surveys of 76 college students for seven days, all waking hours. We examined effects of sleep duration and sleep debt. Our results show that with less sleep, people report higher perceived work pressure and productivity. Also, computer focus duration is significantly shorter suggesting higher multitasking. The more sleep debt, the more Facebook use and the higher the negative mood. With less sleep, people may seek out activities requiring less attentional resources such as social media use. Our results have theoretical implications for multitasking: physiological and cognitive reasons could explain more computer activity switches: related to less sleep.

Previous research on reducing unwanted interruptions in hospital intensive care units (ICU) have focused on providing context-aware solutions that consider factors such as location and activity of the person receiving the interruption. We seek to broaden an understanding of how to manage interruptions by using the Locales Framework to analyze data collected from a field study on mobile notification interruptions in the ICU. Based on our data along with previous literature on cognitive theories, mental models, strategies for managing interruptions, and principles of human factors, we propose five guidelines to aid in designing mobile technology interventions for the ICU.

Given the importance of creativity for both personal and societal achievements, there have been consistent efforts to stimulate creative ability. But an important environmental factor --- blue (i.e., short wavelength) light --- has been relatively unexplored to date. Blue light improves a number of cognitive processes (e.g., attention, working memory and sleep) known to influence our creative abilities. In this study, we investigate the effects of blue light on enhancing creativity in tasks and compare it to the effects of walking, which has been shown to stimulate creative ability. Based on data from 21 participants over 2 weeks, we found that blue light resulted in a 24.3% increase in convergent thinking ability, while walking improved divergent thinking by 18%. We discuss the implications of the findings within the context of UbiComp research. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic examination of the impact of blue light on convergent and divergent thinking ability.

Despite a long history and a large volume of affective research, measuring affective states is still a non-trivial task that is complicated by numerous conceptual and methodological decisions that the researcher has to make. We suggest that inconsistent results reported in some areas of research can be partially explained by the choice of measurements that capture different manifestations of affective phenomena, or focus on different elements of affective processes. In the present study we examine one of such topics - a relationship between stress and individual's work role. In a 2-week, multi-method in situ study we collected affective information from 40 subjects. All participants provided continuous physiological (cardiovascular) data for the entire duration of the study, submitted multiple daily self-reports of momentary affect, and filled out a onetime assessment of the global perceived stress. We found that individuals' job role (specifically, decision-making workload) was not related to the cumulative measures of momentary affect, but was negatively correlated with the overall level of perceived stress. We further found that this negative relationship was partially mediated by individuals' coping behaviors. Our results emphasize the important difference between fleeting and global (appraised) affective states, and remind about intervening variables that can significantly modify affective processes. We suggest directions for future research and discuss practical applications for stress management.

A common assumption in studies of interruptions is that one is focused in an activity and then distracted by other stimuli. We take the reverse perspective and examine whether one might first be in an attentional state that makes one susceptible to communications typically associated with distraction. We explore the confluence of multitasking and workplace communications from three temporal perspectives -- prior to an interaction, when tasks and communications are interleaved, and at the end of the day. Using logging techniques and experience sampling, we observed 32 employees in situ for five days. We found that certain attentional states lead people to be more susceptible to particular types of interaction. Rote work is followed by more Facebook or face-to-face interaction. Focused and aroused states are followed by more email. The more time in email and face-fo-face interaction, and the more total screen switches, the less productive people feel at the day's end. We present the notion of emotional homeostasis along with new directions for multitasking research.

We take an ecological approach to studying social media use and its relation to mood among college students. We conducted a mixed-methods study of computer and phone logging with daily surveys and interviews to track college students' use of social media during all waking hours over seven days. Continual and infrequent checkers show different preferences of social media sites. Age differences also were found. Lower classmen tend to be heavier users and to primarily use Facebook, while upper classmen use social media less frequently and utilize sites other than Facebook more often. Factor analysis reveals that social media use clusters into patterns of content-sharing, text-based entertainment/discussion, relationships, and video consumption. The more constantly one checks social media daily, the less positive is one's mood. Our results suggest that students construct their own patterns of social media usage to meet their changing needs in their environment. The findings can inform further investigation into social media use as a benefit and/or distraction for students.

Internet censorship has been a popular topic both in academia and in the popular press. A fundamental question that has not been fully addressed is how censorship is perceived by people who experience it. A person may exhibit pro- or anti-censorship attitudes, but it is possible that (s)he may not even be aware of its existence. In this study, we report results of a large-scale survey on Chinese Internet users' experiences with Internet censorship. The results show that users' demographic backgrounds, Internet usage experience, and personality influence their attitudes toward censorship. Those who score high on authoritarian personality measures tend to support censorship. Attitudes toward censorship change so that over time it is viewed as more normal, which suggests a “normalization” process. We discuss how these findings can generalize beyond the Chinese context to other societies in which Internet censorship can exist.

Social media platforms have emerged as prominent information sharing ecosystems in the context of a variety of recent crises, ranging from mass emergencies, to wars and political conflicts. We study affective responses in social media and how they might indicate desensitization to violence experienced in communities embroiled in an armed conflict. Specifically, we examine three established affect measures: negative affect, activation, and dominance as observed on Twitter in relation to a number of statistics on protracted violence in four major cities afflicted by the Mexican Drug War. During a two year period (Aug 2010 - Dec 2012), while violence was on the rise in these regions, our findings show a decline in negative emotional expression as well as a rise in emotional arousal and dominance in Twitter posts: aspects known to be psychological markers of desensitization. We discuss the implications of our work for behavioral health, facilitating rehabilitation efforts in communities enmeshed in an acute and persistent urban warfare, and the impact on civic engagement.

While distractions using digital media have received attention in HCI, understanding engagement in workplace activities has been little explored. We logged digital activity and continually probed perspectives of 32 information workers for five days in situ to understand how attentional states change with context. We present a framework of how engagement and challenge in work relate to focus, boredom, and rote work. Overall, we find more focused attention than boredom in the workplace. Focus peaks mid-afternoon while boredom is highest in early afternoon. People are happiest doing rote work and most stressed doing focused work. On Mondays people are most bored but also most focused. Online activities are associated with different attentional states, showing different patterns at beginning and end of day, and before and after a mid-day break. Our study shows how rhythms of attentional states are associated with context and time, even in a dynamic workplace environment.

While HCI has focused on multitasking with information workers, we report on multitasking among Millennials who grew up with digital media - focusing on college students. We logged computer activity and used biosensors to measure stress of 48 students for 7 days for all waking hours, in their in situ environments. We found a significant positive relationship with stress and daily time spent on computers. Stress is positively associated with the amount of multitasking. Conversely, stress is negatively associated with Facebook and social media use. Heavy multitaskers use significantly more social media and report lower positive affect than light multitaskers. Night habits affect multitasking the following day: late-nighters show longer duration of computer use and those ending their activities earlier in the day multitask less. Our study shows that college students multitask at double the frequency compared to studies of information workers. These results can inform designs for stress management of college students.

Enterprise social media can provide visibility of users' actions and thus has the potential to reveal insights about users in the organization. We mined large-scale social media use in an enterprise to examine: a) user roles with such broad platforms and b) whether people with large social networks are highly regarded. First, a factor analysis revealed that most variance of social media usage is explained by commenting and 'liking' behaviors while other usage can be characterized as patterns of distinct tool usage. These results informed the development of a model showing that online network size interacts with other media usage to predict who is highly assessed in the organization. We discovered that the smaller one's online social network size in the organization, the more highly assessed they were by colleagues. We explain this inverse relationship as due to friending behavior being highly visible but not yet valued in the organization.

What makes people feel happy, engaged and challenged at work? We conducted an in situ study of Facebook and face-to-face interactions examining how they influence people's mood in the workplace. Thirty-two participants in an organization were each observed for five days in their natural work environment using automated data capture and experience sampling. Our results show that online and offline social interactions are associated with different moods, suggesting that they serve different purposes at work. Face-to-face interactions are associated with a positive mood throughout the day whereas Facebook use and engagement in work contribute to a positive feeling at the end of the day. Email use is associated with negative affect and along with multitasking, is associated with a feeling of engagement and challenge throughout the day. Our findings provide initial evidence of how online and offline interactions affect workplace mood, and could inform practices to improve employee morale.

For information workers who monitor numerous constantly updating data streams, conserving cognitive resources is crucial. This study evaluated how an interface affects information workers' ability to grasp critical information from multiple text-based chat streams under time pressure. We designed and built a working prototype that displays ten chat streams simultaneously in standard chat windows (ST) and ticker tapes (TT). We conducted a lab experiment to evaluate differences in how these two interfaces support signal and context detection. We found that with ST, participants detected significantly more target words (SAT words) with rarer frequency and significantly more context information (disaster facts) than with TT. Our results show that while TT is potentially better for overview scanning of multiple streams, ST is likely to be better for multi-tasking. Our study informs the design of future multi-chat systems so that large amounts of information can be easier to detect and process.

Since 2006 social media use has grown dramatically in China. Social media has become a stage for citizens to report and disseminate news and to vocalize viewpoints, at times competing with reports from highly curated official media sources. These competing news channels, oftentimes presenting contradictory information, raise questions about citizens' trust in these different media. This study explores the level of trust Chinese Internet users place on news from social media versus official media. We conducted a large-scale anonymous survey in China that revealed that official and citizen news attract different audience groups and each group uses different features to assess news trustworthiness. We present a model for predicting preference for news from citizen media. The results reveal features of social media that explain why some citizens trust it as a channel for news. The results also suggest that in highly regulated news environments, citizen media has the potential to become an alternative news channel where citizens can trust each other for information.

We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an organization. We employed both quantitative measures such as computer log data and ethnographic methods to compare a baseline condition (normal email usage) with our experimental manipulation (email cutoff). Our results show that without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email. Interview data were consistent with our quantitative measures, as participants reported being able to focus more on their tasks. We discuss the implications for managing email better in organizations.

In this paper we investigate the role blogs played within the context of the Egyptian revolution of early 2011 using blog data authored between 2004-2011. We conducted topic modeling analysis to gain a longitudinal view of the interaction of societal, personal and revolutionary blog topics over this period. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis of blog posts during the period that bracketed the political uprising revealed Egyptian bloggers' concerns. Reporting events and supplying commentary provided bloggers with a means to voice dissent against institutionalized power represented by the government-controlled media. In short, blogs reveal a counter-narrative to the government-supplied version of events in Egypt during the 18-day uprising. These narratives offer rich documentation of how blogs, and perhaps social media more generally, can be utilized by individuals operating under repressive conditions.

Disaster-related research in human-centered computing has typically focused on the shorter-term, emergency period of a disaster event, whereas effects of some crises are long-term, lasting years. Social media archived on the Internet provides researchers the opportunity to examine societal reactions to a disaster over time. In this paper we examine how blogs written during a protracted conflict might reflect a collective view of the event. The sheer amount of data originating from the Internet about a significant event poses a challenge to researchers; we employ topic modeling and pronoun analysis as methods to analyze such large-scale data. First, we discovered that blog war topics temporally tracked the actual, measurable violence in the society suggesting that blog content can be an indicator of the health or state of the affected population. We also found that people exhibited a collective identity when they blogged about war, as evidenced by a higher use of first-person plural pronouns compared to blogging on other topics. Blogging about daily life decreased as violence in the society increased; when violence waned, there was a resurgence of daily life topics, potentially illustrating how a society returns to normalcy.

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of Facebook use amongst a population living through ongoing disruption. We interviewed 45 Iraqi citizens, as well as received survey responses from 218 individuals, who have been experiencing the current Gulf War since March 2003. We show how people in a society experiencing conflict use Facebook in ways that are different to uses in non-war societies. We find that Facebook supports people living in crisis environments at two levels. First, Facebook aids people directly to recover from disruption. People used Facebook to create "safe lists", to seek help and provide assistance, and to re-construct their social scaffolding. But at a deeper level, citizens also used Facebook to maintain and develop new social norms, and to re-direct their country. We discuss how disruption can serve as an opportunity by which people can re-invent their societies and how our understandings of Facebook should evolve.

Self-interruptions account for a significant portion of task switching in information-centric work contexts. However, most of the research to date has focused on understanding, analyzing and designing for external interruptions. The causes of self-interruptions are not well understood. In this paper we present an analysis of 889 hours of observed task switching behavior from 36 individuals across three high-technology information work organizations. Our analysis suggests that self-interruption is a function of organizational environment and individual differences, but also external interruptions experienced. We find that people in open office environments interrupt themselves at a higher rate. We also find that people are significantly more likely to interrupt themselves to return to solitary work associated with central working spheres, suggesting that self-interruption occurs largely as a function of prospective memory events. The research presented contributes substantially to our understanding of attention and multitasking in context.

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of the technology-enabled behavior that took place amongst a citizen population living in a conflict zone. We interviewed 65 Iraqi citizens who experienced the current Gulf War beginning in March 2003. In the context of a disrupted environment, trust in people and institutions can erode. We find that trust is contextual-as aspects of the physical world change, conceptions of trust can also change. We show how people were able to create a context of trust in the environment by using ICTs to manage their public identity, to conduct background checks, and to develop collaborative practices that relied on those with whom interpersonal trust previously existed. These new practices, in turn, enabled people to maintain work collaborations, to determine whether or not to continue interacting with others in public, to be able to travel safely, and to find trustworthy jobs. In developing these new practices we argue that technology enabled people to restore a sense of normalcy in an environment that had radically changed.

Workplace collaboration often requires interruptions, which can happen at inopportune times. Sharing availability information can reduce many of these untimely interruptions. However, designing a successful availability-sharing system requires finding the right balance to maximize the benefits and reduce costs for both the interrupter and interruptee. The main challenges for finding such balance lie in the acquisition of availability information from the interruptee and its delivery to the interrupter. In this demonstration, we show how common technical approaches in ubicomp can address some of the problems typically encountered in availability sharing. We present InterruptMe, a novel availability sharing system that uses sensor information to calculate multiple availability measures for each interruptee and that delivers this information in the periphery of the interrupter's attention by using a projected peripheral display and monitoring implicit inputs to the system.

Workplace collaboration often requires interruptions, which can happen at inopportune times. Designing a successful availability-sharing system requires finding the right balance to optimize the benefits and reduce costs for both the interrupter and interruptee. In this paper, we examine the design space of availability-sharing systems and identify six relevant design dimensions: abstraction, presentation, information delivery, symmetry, obtrusiveness and temporal gradient. We describe these dimensions in terms of the tensions between interrupters and interruptees revealed in previous studies of workplace collaboration and deployments of awareness systems. As a demonstration of the utility of our design space, we introduce InterruptMe, a novel availability-sharing system that represents a previously unexplored point in the design space and that balances the tensions between interrupters and interruptees. InterruptMe differs from previous systems in that it displays availability information only when needed by monitoring implicit inputs from the system's users, implements a traceable asymmetry structure, and introduces the notion of per-communications channel availability.

introduction Share on Introduction: Social media and collaborative systems for crisis management Authors: Starr Roxanne Hiltz New Jersey Institute of Technology New Jersey Institute of TechnologyView Profile , Paloma Diaz Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Universidad Carlos III de MadridView Profile , Gloria Mark University of California, Irvine University of California, IrvineView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 18Issue 4Article No.: 18pp 1–6https://doi.org/10.1145/2063231.2063232Published:30 December 2011Publication History 49citation3,089DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations49Total Downloads3,089Last 12 Months86Last 6 weeks7 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

When societies experience disruption as caused by natural disasters, various official government agencies, relief organizations, and emergent citizen groups engage in activities that aid in the recovery effort—the process that leads to the resumption of normal life. In war environments however, societal trust can be affected and people may develop distrust of the institutions and associated individuals that provide and resolve breakdowns in infrastructure. This article reports on an ethnographic study of the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by citizens experiencing ongoing disruption in a conflict zone. We conducted 90 semistructured interviews with Iraqi civilians who experienced the 2 nd Gulf War beginning in March 2003. We show how citizens used ICTs to continuously resolve breakdowns in infrastructure during ongoing disruption caused by the conflict, by creating new, reliable technology-mediated social arrangements that enabled people to maintain daily routines for travel, education, and obtaining information. We then discuss new ways to think about infrastructure and implications for the disaster relief effort.

The blogosphere is changing how people experience war and conflict. We conducted an analysis of 125 blogs written by Iraqi citizens experiencing extreme disruption in their country. We used Hoffman's [8] stages of recovery model to understand how blogs support people in a region where conflict is occurring. We found that blogs create a safe virtual environment where people could interact, free of the violence in the physical environment and of the strict social norms of their changing society in wartime. Second, blogs enable a large network of global support through their interactive and personal nature. Third, blogs enable people experiencing a conflict to engage in dialogue with people outside their borders to discuss their situation. We discuss how blogs enable people to collaboratively interpret conflict through communities of interest and discussion with those who comment. We discuss how technology can better support blog use in a global environment.

Most technical support for multi-tasking considers multi-tasking as a single-user activity. We consider multi-tasking instead as a collaborative activity and in this paper, we report on a prototype designed to help people manage interruptions by broadcasting to colleagues their availability for interruptions for specific projects. The prototype is designed as a tangible interface, a desktop Japanese Garden where rocks represent a person's projects. We first performed ethnographic observations of the prototype in a natural work environment and found that users used the prototype easily to signal work on their current task-at-hand. However, we found that social agreements are needed as well as a technical solution. We then conducted an experiment to test the use of the prototype compared to using a chat system alone to signal availability for interruptions. Our results showed that with our prototype, task performance results did not differ, but collaborating partners sent significantly fewer coordination messages, fewer inappropriate messages, and produced fewer interruptions. We discuss future design ideas using tangible interfaces to manage multi-tasking.

Citizen response to disaster has begun to receive attention in the CHI community but little attention has so far been given to how citizens use technology to adapt when their country is at war. We report on an ethnographic interview study of how technology was adopted and used by citizens to be resilient during wartime. We interviewed 45 Iraqi citizens experiencing the current Iraq war. Based on our data we identified properties of resilience: reconfiguring social networks, self-organization, redundancy, proactive practices, and repairing trust in information. Technology supported people in being resilient by enabling them to control identity, to collaborate in travel, to create an organizational memory, and to provide alternative sources of news and information. As people adopted and used technology to be resilient we found a merging of old and new cultural practices. We discuss these systemic changes and describe implications for how technology can support people in being resilient in disrupted environments.

Nomadic work, an extreme form of mobile work, is becoming increasingly prevalent in organizations. Yet so far there has not been enough research attention on the particular challenges that nomadic workers face in order to design support for their work practices. We employed ethnographic interviews and observations to understand nomadic work practices. Drawing from strategies for survival of pastoralist nomads to guide our design investigation, we focus on an integrated perspective of nomadic work involving challenges related to assembling actants, seeking resources, and integrating with others in the organization. We discovered that nomadic workers need to continually seek out and compete for resources to maintain their mobile offices. They also face challenges in integrating into the organization to maintain visibility and to synchronize with others for meeting. We discuss the design recommendations that emerged from our investigation.

We performed an empirical study to investigate whether the context of interruptions makes a difference. We found that context does not make a difference but surprisingly, people completed interrupted tasks in less time with no difference in quality. Our data suggests that people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price: experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressure and effort. Individual differences exist in the management of interruptions: personality measures of openness to experience and need for personal structure predict disruption costs of interruptions. We discuss implications for how system design can support interrupted work.

There is a growing literature on managing multitasking and interruptions in the workplace. In an ethnographic study, we investigated the phenomenon of communication chains, the occurrence of interactions in quick succession. Focusing on chains enable us to better understand the role of communication in multitasking. Our results reveal that chains are prevalent in information workers, and that attributes such as the number of links, and the rate of media and organizational switching can be predicted from the first catalyzing link of the chain. When chains are triggered by external interruptions, they have more links, a trend for more media switches and more organizational switches. We also found that more switching of organizational contexts in communication is associated with higher levels of stress. We describe the role of communication chains as performing alignment in multitasking and discuss the implications of our results.

In CSCW, there has been little or no attention given to how people use technology to restore collaborations when there is a major environmental disruption. We are especially interested in studying resilience in collaboration-the extent to which people continue to collaborate with work groups or to socialize despite prolonged disruption. We conducted an empirical study of people living in two countries that experienced prolonged disruption through war in their work and personal lives. We describe how technology played a major role in providing people with alternative resources to reconstruct, modify, and develop new routines, or patterns of action, for work and socializing. People created new assemblages of technological and physical resources. We discuss how the use of new resources in creating new routines led to more of a reliance on virtual work and in some cases to deeper structural changes.

Knowledge management (KM) remains an anomaly in most corporations today. Critics call KM a fad of the 1990s, whereas supporters claim KM is actively evolving. Our work examines the disciplinary rhetoric of KM: how is it that practitioners of KM seek to legitimize their field in the corporate world? We focus on practitioners in the aerospace industry and their forum. We argue that this forum serves as a hub for constructing KM's legitimacy. Our two year ethnography traces the rhetorical strategies utilized by informants in and out of a professional community to legitimize KM as discipline in the aerospace industry.

Despite their rapid proliferation, there has been little examination of the coordination and social practices of cyberinfrastructure projects. We use the notion of "human infrastructure" to explore how human and organizational arrangements share properties with technological infrastructures. We conducted an 18-month ethnographic study of a large-scale distributed biomedical cyberinfrastructure project and discovered that human infrastructure is shaped by a combination of both new and traditional team and organizational structures. Our data calls into question a focus on distributed teams as the means for accomplishing distributed work and we argue for using human infrastructure as an alternative perspective for understanding how distributed collaboration is accomplished in big science.

We present data from detailed observation of 24 information workers that shows that they experience work fragmentation as common practice. We consider that work fragmentation has two components: length of time spent in an activity, and frequency of interruptions. We examined work fragmentation along three dimensions: effect of collocation, type of interruption, and resumption of work. We found work to be highly fragmented: people average little time in working spheres before switching and 57% of their working spheres are interrupted. Collocated people work longer before switching but have more interruptions. Most internal interruptions are due to personal work whereas most external interruptions are due to central work. Though most interrupted work is resumed on the same day, more than two intervening activities occur before it is. We discuss implications for technology design: how our results can be used to support people to maintain continuity within a larger framework of their working spheres.

Most current designs of information technology are based on the notion of supporting distinct tasks such as document production, email usage, and voice communication. In this paper we present empirical results that suggest that people organize their work in terms of much larger and thematically connected units of work. We present results of fieldwork observation of information workers in three different roles: analysts, software developers, and managers. We discovered that all of these types of workers experience a high level of discontinuity in the execution of their activities. People average about three minutes on a task and somewhat more than two minutes using any electronic tool or paper document before switching tasks. We introduce the concept of working spheres to explain the inherent way in which individuals conceptualize and organize their basic units of work. People worked in an average of ten different working spheres. Working spheres are also fragmented; people spend about 12 minutes in a working sphere before they switch to another. We argue that design of information technology needs to support people's continual switching between working spheres.

In this paper, we draw on theory about social worlds to analyze how different organizational contexts affect groupware adoption. We report on a study of the adoption of data conferencing in a large distributed organization. Our data show that the diffusion process, which was driven by the users, was a result of communication and transformation of the technology across different social worlds. We also discovered that membership in multiple social worlds in an organization creates a tension for the potential adopter who is in a distributed team. To function effectively, team members must uniformly adopt the technology, yet some may face resistance at their organizational homes. Our case study showed that adoption was affected by organizational sites having conflicting views of the value of collaboration, different amounts and needs for resources, and different acceptance of technology standards. Potential technology adopters on distributed teams are faced with conflicting loyalties, constraints, and requirements between their distributed collaborations and organizational homes.

We describe a model of the process by which people solve problems using information visualization systems. The model was based on video analysis of forty dyads who performed information visualization tasks in an experiment. We examined the following variables: focused questions vs. free data discovery, remote vs. collocated collaboration, and systems judged to have high and low transparency. The model describes the stages of reasoning and generating solutions with visual data. We found the model to be fairly robust across task type, collaborative setting, and system type, though subtle differences were found. We propose that system transparency can support some stages of the process, and that support is needed in the last stage to help users translate their findings from visual to written representations.

There has been sparse study of how requirements analysis is performed in situ, i.e. by organizations building large, complex systems. We assert that a better understanding of in situ requirements practice is necessary to improve and ground current theories of requirements analysis. We performed an empirical field study to examine in detail the issues faced by practitioners in forming and stabilizing requirements and the procedures they created to overcome them. We found that the process of requirements determination was intimately related to project selection. We further observed that these two processes were based on the interplay of 1) applied technical, project, and organizational authority with 2) design, sensemaking, and negotiation activity. The ethnography produced an idealized, grounded authority-activity model of requirements analysis and project selection. The model is a generalized form of requirements analysis-project selection for large, complex, risk adverse (highly sensitive to failure) projects. It represents a method to balance the differentiated authority of the stakeholder groups with the activities necessary to form and stabilize technology-project candidates and their related requirements. We argue that the core issues addressed in this field study are generalizable across organizations that build large, complex systems and hence, the results of this study form a basis for a general theory of requirements analysis practice.

In this study, we examine how geographic distance affects collaboration using computer-mediated communication technology. We investigated experimentally the effects of cooperating partners being in the same or distant city on three behaviors: cooperation, persuasion, and deception using video conferencing and instant messaging (IM). Our results indicate that subjects are more likely to deceive, be less persuaded by, and initially cooperate less, with someone they believe is in a distant city, as opposed to in the same city as them. Although people initially cooperate less with someone they believe is far away, their willingness to cooperate increases quickly with interaction. Since the same media were used in both the far and near city conditions, these effects cannot be attributed to the media, but rather to social differences. This study confirms how CSCW needs to be concerned with developing technologies for bridging social distance, as well as geographic distance.

We present an empirical study investigating collaborative and individual decision-making about data using two different information visualization systems. Based on previous research, one system is considered more transparent than the other in terms of visual representation and functionality. We found that people who worked in groups were more correct in their answers for objective questions, based on searching a large dataset. These results held for the more transparent system, but not the less transparent system. In a second task, groups were more accurate in their results for a free data discovery task. Again, these results held for the more transparent system only. Subjects using this system also produced results that were higher in complexity but judged lower in importance. Groups and individuals did not differ. We suggest that given the right visualization system, groups do better than individuals in finding more accurate results, but not necessarily increased or more meaningful results.

The relationship between project selection and requirements analysis is important, yet has not received much attention. The decisions made during project selection directly affect and frame a project's requirements analysis. In current practice, it is expected that requirements analysis begins after project selection has occurred. Yet, we know little empirically about the procedural relationship between project selection and requirements analysis. We performed a field study to examine in detail how project selection is performed and what procedural relationship, if any, exists between project selection and requirements analysis. We found, contrary to the common view of requirements engineering practice, that requirements analysis occurred in multiple parallel streams. We observed that requirements analysis helped define the initial project choices. In addition, as the project selection process progressed, each candidate project's requirements were further refined. We call this process multiple parallel competitive requirements analysis (MPCRA). We argue that MPCRA should be considered as a viable alternative to current requirements engineering practices, especially for determining and designing large-scale complex projects.

We present two experimental studies examining the effects of videoconferencing and application sharing on task performance. We studied performance on a cognitive reasoning task while subjects were observed via two-way video, one-way video and application sharing. Results demonstrate that performance is impaired when subjects are observed via media compared to when they are not observed. Surprisingly, we found no significant difference in awareness of the observer's presence between the application sharing and the two-way video conditions. This is surprising because application sharing lacks visual feedback of the observer. This finding contradicts social presence theory which claims that media which provides visual feedback of others produce the greatest sense of social presence. Our data also show that media use heightens the perception of task difficulty. We extend social presence theory and argue that these social effects need to be considered in the design and deployment of video and application sharing technologies for use in the workplace.

Achieving a common set of collaboration tools is a significant challenge for people working together in a geographically distributed enterprise. It requires coordinated technology adoption across geographic distance and organizational boundaries. In this paper, we report on the diffusion of a data conferencing technology in a large distributed enterprise. Two years ago we studied the early adopters; now the technology is widespread. We conducted a company-wide survey and found that it is generally the users, and not management, who are the driving force in diffusing the technology across distance. We discuss the organizational conditions that led to the diffusion, how barriers have changed, and emerging work practices as a result of the diffusion.

Interpersonal communication is the basis for almost any type of cooperation. Changing patterns of communication may have an impact on the quality of cooperative work. In this paper, user experiences are described in a long-term groupware project. Communication changes, both planned and unplanned, were examined as a result of the system introduction. Reduced face-to-face communication, task-related and taskunrelated, were found, as well as a changing dissemination of information. Certain losses in interpersonal communication were compensated for by user advocacy and design team-user workshops. It is proposed that with groupware introduction, organizations should consider support for both planned and informal means as compensation for reduced communication.

ti this paper, we present experiences from long-term groupware developmen~introduction and use in an organization.We report lessons learned concerning how a complex design process operates and how its components interac~Our experiences suggest that the processes of requirement analysis, system developmen~and user support need to fac~tate the mer=tig of individud work patterns into congruent system usage.We confirm tbe chm=tig nature of groupwae use by reporting empirical restits descnbmg different learning phases.Ke~ords Cooperative desi~gn,user advocacy, groupware requirements, group work, system inwoduction, prototyping.This paper begins with a description showing how coordination with groupware use is related to the process of group developmen~We then outiine our particular design approach explaining how we tried to achieve a common understanding between tie design team and users, and how we tried to account for user group developmen~ h the foUowing section we present empirical results on the actual use of the system in the work setting, illustrating how tbe group stived to achieve congruent conventions.*POL~e~is funded by

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This full-day workshop is intended for designers, researchers, and decision-makers to discuss and compare their experiences with designing and introducing groupware in an organizational context. Considering the impact that groupware has had on collaboration in recent years, there are relatively few published studies on experiences with introducing groupware. With so few comparisons, it is difficult to develop and appropriate framework which could guide its introduction. Yet it is important not only to understand successes and failiures with methods, but also design and methodology compromises that groupware implementers must live with.