People with invisible chronic illnesses (ICIs) can use social media to seek both informational and emotional support, but these individuals also face social and health-related challenges in posting about their often-stigmatized conditions online. To understand how they evaluate different platforms for disclosure, we interviewed 19 people with ICIs who post on general social media about their illnesses, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We present a cross-platform analysis of how platforms varied in their suitability to achieve participants' goals, as well as the challenges posed by each platform. We also found that as participants' ICIs progressed, their goals, challenges, and social media use similarly evolved over time. Our findings highlight how people with ICIs select platforms from a broader ecology of social media and suggest a general need to understand shifts in social media use for populations with chronic but changing health concerns.

Relatively little work has empirically examined use and non-use of social technologies as more than a dichotomous binary, despite increasing calls to do so. This paper compares three different forms of non/use that might otherwise fall under the single umbrella of Facebook "user": (1) those who have a current active account; (2) those who have deactivated their account; and (3) those who have considered deactivating but not actually done so. A subset of respondents (N=256) from a larger, demographically representative sample of internet users completed measures for usage and perceptions of Facebook, Facebook addiction, privacy experiences and behaviors, and demographics. Multinomial logistic regression modeling shows four specific variables as most predictive of a respondent's type: negative effects from "addictive" use, subjective intensity of Facebook usage, number of Facebook friends, and familiarity with or use of Facebook's privacy settings. These findings both fill gaps left by, and help resolve conflicting expectations from, prior work. Furthermore, they demonstrate how valuable insights can be gained by disaggregating "users" based on different forms of engagement with a given technology.

Motivated by the need to support those self-managing chronic pain, we report on the development and evaluation of a novel pressure-based tangible user interface (TUI) for the self-report of scalar values representing pain intensity. Our TUI consists of a conductive foam-based, force-sensitive resistor (FSR) covered in a soft rubber with embedded signal conditioning, an ARM Cortex-M0 microprocessor, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). In-lab usability and feasibility studies with 28 participants found that individuals were able to use the device to make reliable reports with four degrees of freedom as well map squeeze pressure to pain level and visual feedback. Building on insights from these studies, we further redesigned the FSR into a wearable device with multiple form factors, including a necklace, bracelet, and keychain. A usability study with an additional 7 participants from our target population, elderly individuals with chronic pain, found high receptivity to the wearable design, which offered a number of participant-valued characteristics (e.g., discreetness) along with other design implications that serve to inform the continued refinement of tangible devices that support pain self-assessment.

Previous work has explored regretful experiences on social media. In parallel, scholars have examined how people do not use social media. This paper aims to synthesize these two research areas and asks: Do regretful experiences on social media influence people to (consider) not using social media? How might this influence differ for different sorts of regretful experiences? We adopted a mixed methods approach, combining topic modeling, logistic regressions, and contingency analysis to analyze data from a web survey with a demographically representative sample of US internet users (n=515) focusing on their Facebook use. We found that experiences that arise because of users' own actions influence actual deactivation of their Facebook account, while experiences that arise because of others' actions lead to considerations of non-use. We discuss the implications of these findings for two theoretical areas of interest in HCI: individual agency in social media use and the networked dimensions of privacy.

Information visualizations are often evaluated as a tool in terms of their ability to support performance of a specific task. This article argues that value can be gained by instead evaluating visualizations from a communicative perspective. Specifically, it explores how text visualization can influence the impacts that framing has on the perception of political issues. Using data from a controlled laboratory study, the results presented here demonstrate that exposure to a text visualization can mitigate framing effects. Furthermore, it also shows a transfer effect, where participants who saw the visualization remained uninfluenced by framing in subsequent texts, even when the visualization was absent. These results carry implications for the methods used to evaluate information visualization systems, for understanding the cognitive and interpretive mechanisms by which framing effects occur, and for exploring the design space of interactive text visualization.

To better support the self-management of chronic pain, this paper investigates how those living with the condition prefer to self-assess their pain levels using smartphones. Our work consists of three stages: design ideation and review, an in-lab user study with 10 participants resulting in nine candidate interfaces, and a 3 week field trial of two further honed measures with 12 participants. This research firstly yields a better understanding of participants' strong and sometimes contrasting preferences regarding their self-assessment of pain intensity. We additionally contribute two novel interfaces that support accurate, quick, and repeated use along with other participant-valued interactions (e.g., familiar, relatable, and highly usable). In particular, we focus on designing tailored measures that both enhance respondent motivation as well as minimize the difficulty of meaningful self-assessment by supporting the cog-nitive effort in translating a subjective experience into a single numerical value.

This paper describes the use of the Delphi method as a means of incorporating study participants into the processes of data analysis and interpretation.As a case study, it focuses on perceptions about use and non-use of the social media site Facebook.The work presented here involves three phases.First, a large survey included both a demographically representative sample and a convenience sample.Second, a smaller follow-up survey presented results from that survey back to survey respondents.Third, a series of qualitative member checking interviews with additional survey respondents served to validate the findings of the follow-up survey.This paper demonstrates the utility of Delphi by highlighting the ways that it enables us to synthesize across these three study phases, advancing understanding of perceptions about social media use and non-use.The paper concludes by discussing the broader applicability of the Delphi method across CSCW research.

Researchers in information science and related areas have developed various methods for analyzing textual data, such as survey responses. This article describes the application of analysis methods from two distinct fields, one method from interpretive social science and one method from statistical machine learning, to the same survey data. The results show that the two analyses produce some similar and some complementary insights about the phenomenon of interest, in this case, nonuse of social media. We compare both the processes of conducting these analyses and the results they produce to derive insights about each method's unique advantages and drawbacks, as well as the broader roles that these methods play in the respective fields where they are often used. These insights allow us to make more informed decisions about the tradeoffs in choosing different methods for analyzing textual data. Furthermore, this comparison suggests ways that such methods might be combined in novel and compelling ways.

To examine the processes by which appropriation happens around an interactive art installation in an organizational context, this paper presents a qualitative, longitudinal study of an interactive art installation called mood.cloud. While designed to collect and to visually display building occupants' collective emotion, the installation was not necessarily used or interpreted in this way. Instead, building occupants saw the sensory experience of mood.cloud and the ability to change the display as a way to influence their own feelings, the feelings of others, and the overall workplace ambience. We found that interaction with mood.cloud fostered reflection about the relationship between the individual and the larger collective that the person is a part of. This relationship, between appropriation for individual benefit and appropriation for the benefit of others, afforded participants the opportunity to become more aware of their own contribution as part of a larger community. These findings suggest an opportunity to design systems around the interplay between appropriation for the individual and appropriation for the community.

Throughout the day, our alertness levels change and our cognitive performance fluctuates. The creation of technology that can adapt to such variations requires reliable measurement with ecological validity. Our study is the first to collect alertness data in the wild using the clinically validated Psychomotor Vigilance Test. With 20 participants over 40 days, we find that alertness can oscillate approximately 30% depending on time and body clock type and that Daylight Savings Time, hours slept, and stimulant intake can influence alertness as well. Based on these findings, we develop novel methods for unobtrusively and continuously assessing alertness. In estimating response time, our model achieves a root-mean-square error of 80.64 milliseconds, which is significantly lower than the 500ms threshold used as a standard indicator of impaired cognitive ability. Finally, we discuss how such real-time detection of alertness is a key first step towards developing systems that are sensitive to our biological variations.

Our body clock causes considerable variations in our behavioral, mental, and physical processes, including alertness, throughout the day. While much research has studied technology usage patterns, the potential impact of underlying biological processes on these patterns is under-explored. Using data from 20 participants over 40 days, this paper presents the first study to connect patterns of mobile application usage with these contributing biological factors. Among other results, we find that usage patterns vary for individuals with different body clock types, that usage correlates with rhythms of alertness, that app use features such as duration and switching can distinguish periods of low and high alertness, and that app use reflects sleep interruptions as well as sleep duration. We conclude by discussing how our findings inform the design of biologically-friendly technology that can better support personal rhythms of performance.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the feasibility of automatically assessing the Social Rhythm Metric (SRM), a clinically-validated marker of stability and rhythmicity for individuals with bipolar disorder (BD), using passively-sensed data from smartphones. METHODS: Seven patients with BD used smartphones for 4 weeks passively collecting sensor data including accelerometer, microphone, location, and communication information to infer behavioral and contextual patterns. Participants also completed SRM entries using a smartphone app. RESULTS: We found that automated sensing can be used to infer the SRM score. Using location, distance traveled, conversation frequency, and non-stationary duration as inputs, our generalized model achieves root-mean-square-error of 1.40, a reasonable performance given the range of SRM score (0-7). Personalized models further improve performance with mean root-mean-square-error of 0.92 across users. Classifiers using sensor streams can predict stable (SRM score ≥3.5) and unstable (SRM score <3.5) states with high accuracy (precision: 0.85 and recall: 0.86). CONCLUSIONS: Automatic smartphone sensing is a feasible approach for inferring rhythmicity, a key marker of wellbeing for individuals with BD.

OBJECTIVE: To understand self-monitoring strategies used independently of clinical treatment by individuals with bipolar disorder (BD), in order to recommend technology design principles to support mental health management. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Participants with BD (N = 552) were recruited through the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, the International Bipolar Foundation, and WeSearchTogether.org to complete a survey of closed- and open-ended questions. In this study, we focus on descriptive results and qualitative analyses. RESULTS: Individuals reported primarily self-monitoring items related to their bipolar disorder (mood, sleep, finances, exercise, and social interactions), with an increasing trend towards the use of digital tracking methods observed. Most participants reported having positive experiences with technology-based tracking because it enables self-reflection and agency regarding health management and also enhances lines of communication with treatment teams. Reported challenges stem from poor usability or difficulty interpreting self-tracked data. DISCUSSION: Two major implications for technology-based self-monitoring emerged from our results. First, technologies can be designed to be more condition-oriented, intuitive, and proactive. Second, more automated forms of digital symptom tracking and intervention are desired, and our results suggest the feasibility of detecting and predicting emotional states from patterns of technology usage. However, we also uncovered tension points, namely that technology designed to support mental health can also be a disruptor. CONCLUSION: This study provides increased understanding of self-monitoring practices, attitudes, and needs of individuals with bipolar disorder. This knowledge bears implications for clinical researchers and practitioners seeking insight into how individuals independently self-manage their condition as well as for researchers designing monitoring technologies to support mental health management.

Recognized stress management techniques include cultivating mindfulness, breathing exercises, and meditation. While these approaches have been shown to mitigate the negative effects of stress, they can be difficult to learn or consistently apply. To support these techniques, we developed MoodLight, a playful system that uses ambient colored light to provide feedback regarding an individual's current arousal levels. Like many affective computing systems, MoodLight was designed to help users observe their internal state and learn to relax. However, our findings indicate that prompting or leading feedback can be more effective than real time feedback in helping users relax. This work contributes to affective computing by suggesting alternative approaches to designing biofeedback systems for stress management.

MoodLight is an interactive ambient lighting system that responds to biosensor input related to an individual's current level of arousal. Changes in levels of arousal correspond to fluctuations in the color of light provided by the system, altering the immediate environment in ways intimately related to the user's private internal state. We use this intervention to explore personal and social implications of the ambient display of biosensor data. A design probe study conducted with university students provided the opportunity to observe MoodLight being used by individuals and dyads. Discussion of findings highlights key tensions associated with the dialectics of technology-mediated self-awareness and automated disclosure of personal information, addressing issues of agency, skepticism and uncertainty. This study provides greater understanding of the ways in which the representations of personal informatics, with a focus on ambient feedback, influence our perceptions of ourselves and those around us.

By nature, we are circadian creatures whose bodies' biological clocks drive numerous physiological, mental, and behavioral rhythms. Simultaneously, we are social beings. Accordingly, our internal circadian timings experience interference from externally determined factors such as work schedules and social engagements, and digital connectivity imports additional social constraints that can further misalign our individual body clocks. Misalignment between biological and social time causes social jet lag [50], which has serious physical and mental health consequences. It particularly impacts our sleep processes and neurobehavioral functioning. Examining the interplay between biological rhythms and technology-mediated social interactions, we find that technology may both modulate and reflect circadian rhythms. We also leverage such social-sensor data to infer sleep-related behaviors and disruptions and to analyze variations in attention, cognitive performance, and mood following (in)adequate sleep. We conclude with recommendations for designing technologies attuned to our innate biological traits.

In this paper, we argue that atypical cognitive, perceptual and behavioral characteristics associated with serious mental illnesses should be taken into consideration when designing health technologies. While applications have been developed to assist in the treatment of these illnesses, the specific psychological characteristics of these disorders have rarely been considered extensively in the design process. Here, we explore how an understanding of the low-level characteristics of bipolar disorder, combined with a clinically-validated treatment and patients' lived experience, can inform mHealth design. We present a novel method -- in situ design -- to support ecologically valid design, and demonstrate its use through the co-development with 9 individuals with bipolar disorder of MoodRhythm, a mobile application designed to track and stabilize daily routines. We provide evidence that mHealth design elements tailored to the characteristics and needs of individuals with bipolar disorder can result in engaging interactions.

Eric Baumer, Elisha Elovic, Ying Qin, Francesca Polletta, Geri Gay. Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2015.

Designers have demonstrated an increased interest in designing for reflection. However, that work currently occurs under a variety of diverse auspices. To help organize and investigate this literature, this paper present a review of research on systems designed to support reflection. Key findings include that most work in this area does not actually define the concept of reflection. We also find that most evaluations do not focus on reflection per se rather but on some other outcome arguably linked to reflection. Our review also describes the relationship between reflection and persuasion evidenced implicitly by both rhetorical motivations for and implementation details of system design. After discussing the significance of our findings, we conclude with a series of recommendations for improving research on and design for reflection.

Social support plays an important role in health systems. While significant work has explored the role of social support in CMC environments, less analysis has considered social support in mobile health systems. This paper describes socially supportive messages in VERA, a mobile application for sharing health decisions and behaviors. The short and bursty interactions in social awareness streams [36] afford a particular style of social support, for which we offer the label staccato social support. Results indicate that, in comparison to previous work, staccato social support is characterized by a greater prevalence of esteem support, which builds respect and confidence. We further note the presence of 'following up', a positive behavior that contributes to supportive interactions, likely via social pressure and accountability [7,38]. These findings suggest design recommendations to developers of mobile social support systems and contribute to understanding technologically mediated social support for health.

Gaining an understanding of user needs is a central component of HCI design approaches such as user-centred design and participatory design. In some settings, such as mental health care, access to end-users is often constrained. This is a particular difficulty given that the experience of those with mental illness can be difficult for researchers to understand, and is further complicated by its associated stigma. In addition, the therapeutic setting is outside the common experience of most people and protected from outside intrusion. Although role-play has been used in varied ways in HCI, rarely has it been defined with sufficient clarity to enable others to deploy it in a nuanced manner. We argue that role-play is particularly suited for use in mental healthcare settings and, when used judiciously, can address some of the difficulties associated with working in this setting. This paper details a range of role-play formats appropriated from therapeutic role-play, drawing upon the HCI and mental health literature, therapist input and our experience of using role-play for a number of purposes at different stages of the development process. We consider how and why role-play can be used to generate empathy, gain understanding of therapy, provide feedback on designs before clinical use and help train therapists in using technology in the treatment room.

We often think of ourselves as individuals with steady capabilities. However, converging strands of research indicate that this is not the case. Our biochemistry varies significantly over the course of a 24 hour period. Consequently our levels of alertness, productivity, physical activity, and even sensitivity to pain fluctuate throughout the day. This offers a considerable opportunity for the UbiComp community to identify novel measurements and interventions that can leverage these daily variations. To illustrate this potential, we present results from an empirical study with 9 participants over 97 days investigating whether such variations manifest in low-level smartphone use, focusing on daily rhythms related to sleep. Our findings demonstrate that phone usage patterns can be used to detect and predict individual daily variations indicative of temporal preference, sleep duration, and deprivation. We also identify opportunities and challenges for measuring and enhancing well-being using these simple and effective markers of circadian rhythms.

Visual approaches for conducting research during the design process often give voice to people and ideas that might otherwise remain obscured. Recent and increasing interest in visual research techniques has coincided with technological advances such as camera phones and visually oriented mobile applications. As a result of this close association between digital technologies and image-based research techniques, there are multiple opportunities and challenges within human–computer interaction (HCI) design practice to employ these strategies to improve user experiences. This article provides an overview of current visual approaches to research highlighting the role technology has played in facilitating and inspiring these techniques. A series of case studies are presented that provide a basis for understanding a breadth of visual approaches in HCI design practices as well as serve as a point of entry to a critical and reflective discussion about the use of these approaches in different circumstances. Based on these reflections, three value statements are offered as a means to encourage the use of these visual approaches more broadly and critically in HCI design studies.

We present an alternative approach to the design of personal informatics systems: instead of motivating people to examine their own behaviors, this approach promotes awareness of and reflection on the infrastructures behind personal informatics and the modes of engagement that they promote. Specifically, this paper presents an interface that displays personal web browsing data. The interface aims to reveal underlying infrastructure using several methods: drawing attention to the scope of mined data by displaying deliberately selected sensitive data, using purposeful malfunction as a way to encourage reverse engineering, and challenging normative expectations around data mining by displaying information in unconventional ways. Qualitative results from a two-week deployment show that these strategies can raise people's awareness about data mining, promote efficacy and control over personal data, and inspire reflection on the goals and assumptions embedded in infrastructures for personal data analytics.

This paper examines the use of cultural probes as a method for fostering collaboration within groups of diverse experts working on creative projects. Using two case examples, we show that probes -- short, oblique, and at times whimsical sets of activity prompts - have boundary object properties that can jumpstart interdisciplinary and cross-functional exchange. The first case explores how social scientists and designers used a smartphone-based scavenger hunt activity to gather insights for a workshop on organizational innovation. The second case examines how artist/scientist pairs utilized probe-like prompts to develop short performances for an arts festival. Drawing together theoretical views on boundary objects and cultural probes, we suggest that designed experiences such as probes can create opportunities for both boundary work and the establishment of common ground, which is increasingly vital in the highly collaborative contexts that define work today.

Team science and collaboration have become crucial to addressing key research questions confronting society. Institutions that are spread across multiple geographic locations face additional challenges. To better understand the nature of cross‐campus collaboration within a single institution and the effects of institutional efforts to spark collaboration, we conducted a case study of collaboration atCornellUniversity using scientometric and network analyses. Results suggest that cross‐campus collaboration is increasingly common, but is accounted for primarily by a relatively small number of departments and individual researchers. Specific researchers involved in many collaborative projects are identified, and their unique characteristics are described. Institutional efforts, such as seed grants and topical retreats, have some effect for researchers who are central in the collaboration network, but were less clearly effective for others.

Most mobile technology systems designed to encourage healthy decisions focus on prescriptive persuasion, telling the user either implicitly or explicitly what to do, as the primary means of improving health. However, other technically and socially viable options exist. Drawing on both relevant social theory and previous CSCW research, this paper suggests that open-ended social awareness, making users aware of both others' and their own decisions, may also serve as an effective central design principle for mobile health. To explore this approach, this paper presents analysis of qualitative data from two studies of such a system. Results suggest that open-endedness allowed users flexibility and freedom in defining what counts as health, and that the social aspects compounded both the positive and the occasionally negative impacts of this openness. The paper concludes with implications for the design and evaluation of research on mobile health technology, as well as suggestions for how future work can further explore the design space of mobile health beyond prescriptive persuasion.

In this paper we describe MoBoogie, an application that allows users to manipulate and arrange music through movement. MoBoogie is designed to foster experiences in creative expression for children and potentially adults. The application responds to users' movements by changing variables in a continuous stream of music loops. Results from this study suggest that the creative expressions arose in the joint space of movement and music, and did not primarily have to be in one form or the other. This allowed users with limited experience in dance and music making to be creative in such forms of expression.

The assessment of emotion, or affect, is critical for anyone trying to understand human behavior. But there is a problem: affect as a state is frequently changing and difficult to recall and express, yet in research, we typically only assess it via a single questionnaire at the end of a study. This work presents PAM, the Photographic Affect Meter, a novel tool for measuring affect in which users select from a wide variety of photos the one which best suits their current mood. Our findings indicate that PAM-which takes seconds to complete and is designed to run on modern mobile phones and mobile computing devices-demonstrates strong construct validity across two studies and is very well suited for frequent sampling in context. This work provides a tool to researchers in need of frequent assessment of affect and guidance to others interested in developing similar measurement tools.

Writing about emotional experiences has been shown to have long-term physical and mental health benefits, but it also creates short-term discomfort. We designed a system to motivate expressive writing by enhancing enjoyment and pleasure. Using automated language analysis, we designed a system that maps sound onto categories of language resulting in a musical interpretation of expressive writing texts. An experimental design compared the experience of 126 participants across musical and non-musical writing platforms Participants found the musical system to be more pleasurable.

When experts participate in collaborative systems, tension may arise between them and novice contributors. In particular, when experts perceive novices as a bother or a threat, the experts may express territoriality: behaviors communicating ownership of a target of interest. In this paper, we describe the results of a user study of a mobile social tagging system deployed within a museum gallery to a group of novices and experts collaboratively tagging part of the collection. We observed that experts express greater feelings of ownership towards their contributions to the system and the museum in general. Experts were more likely than novices to participate at higher rates and to negatively evaluate contributions made by others. We suggest a number of design strategies to balance experts' expressions of territoriality so as to motivate their participation while discouraging exclusionary behaviors.

Designers of mobile, social systems must carefully think about how to help their users manage spatial, semantic, and social modes of navigation. Here, we describe our deployment of MobiTags, a system to help museum visitors interact with a collection of "open storage" exhibits, those where the museum provides little curatorial information. MobiTags integrates social tagging, art information, and a map to support navigation and collaborative curation of these open storage collections. We studied 23 people's use of MobiTags in a local museum, combining interview data with device use logs and tracking of people's movements to understand how MobiTags affected their navigation and experience in the museum. Despite a lack of social cues, people feel a strong sense of social presence--and social pressure--through seeing others' tags. The tight coupling of tags, item information, and map features also supported a rich set of practices around these modes of navigation.

While most collaboration technologies are concerned with supporting particular tasks such as workflows or meetings, many work groups do not have the teamwork skills essential to effective collaboration. One way to improve teamwork is to provide dynamic feedback generated by automated analyses of behavior, such as language use. Such feedback can lead members to reflect on and subsequently improve their collaborative behavior, but might also distract from the task at hand. We have experimented with GroupMeter - a chat-based system that presents visual feedback on team members' language use. Feedback on proportion of agreement words and overall word count was presented using two different designs. When receiving feedback, teams in our study expressed more agreement in their conversations and reported greater focus on language use as compared to when not receiving feedback. This suggests that automated, real-time linguistic feedback can elicit behavioral changes, offering opportunities for future research.

Contemporary work increasingly involves interacting with strangers in technology-mediated environments. In this context, we come to rely on digital artifacts to infer characteristics of other people. This paper reports the results of a study conducted in a global company that used expertise search as a vehicle for exploring how people interpret a range of information available in online profiles in evaluating whom to interact with for expertise. Using signaling theory as a conceptual framework, we describe how certain 'signals' in various social software are hard to fake, and are thus more reliable indicators of expertise. Multi-level regression analysis revealed that participation in social software, social connection information, and self-described expertise in the corporate directory were significantly helpful in the decision to contact someone for expertise. Qualitative analysis provided further insights regarding the interpretations people form of others' expertise from digital artifacts. We conclude with suggestions on differentiating various types of information available within online profiles and implications for the design of expertise locator/recommender systems.

Territoriality, the expression of ownership towards an object, can emerge when social actors occupy a shared social space. In the case of Wikipedia, the prevailing cultural norm is one that warns against ownership of one's work. However, we observe the emergence of territoriality in online space with respect to a subset of articles that have been tagged with the Maintained template through a qualitative study of 15 editors who have self-designated as Maintainers. Our participants communicated ownership, demarcated boundaries and asserted their control over artifacts for the sake of quality by appropriating existing features of Wikipedia. We then suggest design strategies to support these behaviors in the proper context within collaborative authoring systems more generally.

Technologies in museums often support learning goals, providing information about exhibits. However, museum visitors also desire meaningful experiences and enjoy the social aspects of museum-going, values ignored by most museum technologies. We present ArtLinks, a visualization with three goals: helping visitors make connections to exhibits and other visitors by highlighting those visitors who share their thoughts; encouraging visitors' reflection on the social and liminal aspects of museum-going and their expectations of technology in museums; and doing this with transparency, aligning aesthetically pleasing elements of the design with the goals of connection and reflection. Deploying ArtLinks revealed that people have strong expectations of technology as an information appliance. Despite these expectations, people valued connections to other people, both for their own sake and as a way to support meaningful experience. We also found several of our design choices in the name of transparency led to unforeseen tradeoffs between the social and the liminal.

Coordinating goals, schedules, and tasks among collaborators is difficult, and made even more so when there are disciplinary, geographic and institutional boundaries that must be spanned. Designing CSCW tools to support coordination in these settings, however, requires an improved under-standing of the constraints and conflicts that impede effective collaboration. We present findings from a study of distributed collaborations between academic surgeons and biomedical engineering researchers. These two groups differ significantly in their work priorities and institutional contexts, but are nonetheless able to work together and co-ordinate effectively. They accomplish this via human mediation, frequent ad hoc communication, and optimizing the use of their limited face-to-face interaction opportunities.

This study explores the relationship between the structure of an existing social network and the structure of an emergent discussion-board network in an undergraduate university class. Thirty-one students were issued with laptop computers that remained in their possession for the duration of the semester. While using these machines, participants' email log files were collected directly from the University's email servers. The analysis compared structural attributes of actors evident in their social network with the emergent structural properties measured from interactions in a shared discussion board environment. A significant relationship was found between the existing social network structure and the emergent communication patterns, suggesting that existing relationships have a strong influence on subsequent computer-mediated communication. Additional matrices were used to control for gender, major and perceived computer efficacy, none of which had a significant effect.

Abstract This article surveys the use of eye tracking in investigations of online search. Three eye tracking experiments that we undertook are discussed and compared to additional work in this area, revealing recurring behaviors and trends. The first two studies are described in greater detail in Granka, Joachims, & Gay (2004), Lorigo et al. (2006), and Pan et al. (2007), and the third study is described for the first time in this article. These studies reveal how users view the ranked results on a search engine results page (SERP), the relationship between the search result abstracts viewed and those clicked on, and whether gender, search task, or search engine influence these behaviors. In addition, we discuss a key challenge that arose in all three studies that applies to the use of eye tracking in studying online behaviors which is due to the limited support for analyzing scanpaths, or sequences of eye fixations. To meet this challenge, we present a preliminary approach that involves a graphical visualization to compare a path with a group of paths. We conclude by summarizing our findings and discussing future work in further understanding online search behavior with the help of eye tracking.

Effective communication in project teams is important, but not often taught. We explore how feedback might improve teamwork in a controlled experiment where groups interact through chat rooms. Collaborators who receive high feedback ratings use different language than poor collaborators (e.g. more words, fewer assents, and less affect-laden language). Further, feedback affects language use. This suggests that a system could use linguistic analysis to automatically provide and visualize feedback to teach teamwork. To this end, we present GroupMeter, a system that applies principles discovered in the experiment to provide feedback both from peers and from automated linguistic analysis.

We describe the design and evaluation of K-net, a social matching system to help people learn 'who knows what' in an organization by matching people with skills with those who need them. Transactive memory theory predicts that K-net will improve individuals' awareness of 'who knows what'. This should lead to improved performance through sharing knowledge across group boundaries. We evaluate K-net in terms of these predictions in an experiment with 41 students in seven groups working on software engineering projects. Accurate recommendations improved awareness of 'who knows what' versus 'random' recommendations, but did not improve performance. Our results highlight issues related to the evaluation of systems for sharing knowledge across group boundaries.

This article examines the reliability of implicit feedback generated from clickthrough data and query reformulations in World Wide Web (WWW) search. Analyzing the users' decision process using eyetracking and comparing implicit feedback against manual relevance judgments, we conclude that clicks are informative but biased. While this makes the interpretation of clicks as absolute relevance judgments difficult, we show that relative preferences derived from clicks are reasonably accurate on average. We find that such relative preferences are accurate not only between results from an individual query, but across multiple sets of results within chains of query reformulations.

This study investigates which components of a web page are most likely to both attract and maintain a viewer's attention. We measure these two aspects of viewing behavior---attention onset and maintenance---through an analysis of eye movements on three Web page components---page location, element size, and information density. More specifically, the present research addresses how the overall composition and structure of a Web page influences an individual's ability to perceive content.

While fixation data and saccadic indices have been employed as individual measures, less frequent analysis has been attempted on the sequence or pattern data that these two indices together create. The patterns of fixations and saccades are rich and complex, and hence, they are typically studied as individual paths or parts of paths that are isolated. Analysis is usually a visual comparison, although more recently there have been studies that have compared scan patterns statistically [Josephson and Holmes 2002; Pan et al. 2002; Yarbus 1967]. In the current work we explore a method for deriving an "average" scan pattern aggregated from many users viewing the same visual stimulus (web site).

Abstract The KMODDL (kinematic models for design digital library) is a digital library based on a historical collection of kinematic models made of steel and bronze. The digital library contains four types of learning modules including textual materials, QuickTime virtual reality movies, Java simulations, and stereolithographic files of the physical models. The authors report an evaluation study on the uses of the KMODDL in two undergraduate classes. This research reveals that the users in different classes encountered different usability problems, and reported quantitatively different subjective experiences. Further, the results indicate that depending on the subject area, the two user groups preferred different types of learning modules, resulting in different uses of the available materials and different learning outcomes. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for future digital library design.

This paper examines the reliability of implicit feedback generated from clickthrough data in WWW search. Analyzing the users' decision process using eyetracking and comparing implicit feedback against manual relevance judgments, we conclude that clicks are informative but biased. While this makes the interpretation of clicks as absolute relevance judgments difficult, we show that relative preferences derived from clicks are reasonably accurate on average.

This study examines the formation and change of collaborative learning social networks in a distributed learning community. A social network perspective is employed to understand how collaborative networks evolved over time when 31 distributed learners collaborated on a design project using a computer-mediated communication system during two semesters. Special attention was paid to how pre-existing friendship networks influenced the formation of macro-level collaborative learning networks and individual level social capital. We discovered that pre-existing friendship networks significantly influenced the formation of collaborative learning networks, but the effect was dependent on the developmental phase of community. Also, pre-existing networks generally acted as a social liability that constrained learners' ability to enhance their social networks and build social capital when they participated in a new learning environment. The results suggest that, in order to fully understand how to build effective collaborative learning and work environments, participants' social network structures need to be considered.

Abstract Query formation and expansion is an integral part of nearly every effort to search for information. In the work reported here we investigate the effects of domain knowledge and feedback on search term selection and reformation. We explore differences between experts and novices as they generate search terms over 10 successive trials and under two feedback conditions. Search attempts were coded on quantitative dimensions such as the number of unique terms and average time per trial, and as a whole in an attempt to characterize the user's conceptual map for the topic under differing conditions of participant‐defined domain expertise. Nine distinct strategies were identified. Differences emerged as a function of both expertise and feedback. In addition, strategic behavior varied depending on prior search conditions. The results are considered from both a theoretical and design perspective, and have direct implications for digital library usability and metadata generation, and query expansion systems.

In this paper we examine the relationship between emergent social network characteristics in a computer-supported collaborative learning course and locus of control. An emergent communication network of engineering students that took place in a distributed distance learning environment was examined. Three measures of an actor's social network, density, brokerage, and reach, and participants' locus of control, internal vs. external, were assessed. The data suggest that, relative to participants with external locus of control, participants with internal locus of control decreased their network density over time but increased their brokerage and reach. The results are discussed in the context of instrumental action, through which participants are assumed to develop personal networks in pursuit of maximizing potential social capital.

The World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous information source and communication channel. With such an extensive user population, it is imperative to understand how web users view different web pages. Based on an eye tracking study of 30 subjects on 22 web pages from 11 popular web sites, this research intends to explore the determinants of ocular behavior on a single web page: whether it is determined by individual differences of the subjects, different types of web sites, the order of web pages being viewed, or the task at hand. The results indicate that gender of subjects, the viewing order of a web page, and the interaction between page order and site type influences online ocular behavior. Task instruction did not significantly affect web viewing behavior. Scanpath analysis revealed that the complexity of web page design influences the degree of scanpath variation among different subjects on the same web page. The contributions and limitations of this research, and future research directions are discussed.

We investigate how users interact with the results page of a WWW search engine using eye-tracking. The goal is to gain insight into how users browse the presented abstracts and how they select links for further exploration. Such understanding is valuable for improved interface design, as well as for more accurate interpretations of implicit feedback (e.g. clickthrough) for machine learning. The following presents initial results, focusing on the amount of time spent viewing the presented abstracts, the total number of abstract viewed, as well as measures of how thoroughly searchers evaluate their results set.

Humans naturally use behavioral cues in their interactions with other humans. The Media Equation proposes that these same cues are directed towards media, including computers. It is probable that detection of these cues by a computer during run-time could improve usability design and analysis. A preliminary experiment testing one of these cues, Synaptics TouchPad pressure, shows that behavioral cues can be used as a critical incident indicator by detecting negative affect.

Much of the previous research in context-aware computing has sought to find a workable definition of context and to develop systems that could detect and interpret contextual characteristics of an user environment. However, less time has been spent studying the usability of these types of systems. This was the goal of our project. E-graffiti is a context-aware application that detects the user's location on a college campus and displays text notes to the user based on their location. Additionally, it allows them to create notes that they can associate with a specific location. We released E-graffiti to 57 students who were using laptops that could access the campus wireless network. Their use of E-graffiti was logged in a remote database and they were also required to fill out a questionnaire towards the end of the semester. The lessons learned from the evaluation of E-graffiti point to themes other designers of ubiquitous and context-aware applications may need to address in designing their own systems. Some of the issues that emerged in the evaluation stage included difficulties with a misleading conceptual model, lack of use due to the reliance on explicit user input, the need for a highly relevant contextual focus, and the potential benefits of rapid, ongoing prototype development in tandem with user evaluation.

Eighty-four students distributed between two different courses at a major research university (one a communication course, the other a computer science course) were given laptop computers with wireless network access during the course of a semester. A wide variety of data (from questionnaires, e-mail logs, proxy server logs, and diaries) regarding students' use of the laptops for electronic communication, Web browsing, and local application use (e.g., word processing) was collected and analyzed. The influences of course, network (wireless-wired), student population, and the passage of time were investigated in relation to the prevalence and nature of social computing (e.g., e-mail, instant messaging, chat, discussion boards, online annotations) in students' laptop usage. The relative prevalence of social computing increased and became more exclusive for students in the communication course, especially on the wireless network. Social computing and use of the wireless network were less prominent and influential for students in the computer science course.