When Johnson was writing this, said libraries were very exclusive, inaccessible to most. When I was growing up the library was a favorite place to find information with the help of expert assistants, trained librarians. Nowadays, while libraries are still one of my favorite institutions, we have powerful digital information search, retrieval, and assemblage services, bundled into easily accessible tools at our fingertips. As information proliferates and human information needs remain high, information retrieval will continue to be a central area of investigation. We will also need better and better tools to access, assemble, and represent that information in ways that can be understood and applied-tools that ensure information turns into knowledge that is useful and used. In this talk, I will focus on how people find information, and how the tools we build aid in that finding. Using case studies, I will outline some that remain challenging, and offer some case studies and edge cases where more work is needed. I will share thoughts on how emerging assistant devices and services are and are not meeting the challenge of becoming expert information assistant

As the number of devices integrated into our lives skyrockets, we find ourselves inundated with opportunities for interaction. IoT promises to distribute computation and communication so pervasively that it becomes like background music for daily life, but the instruments often intrude in ways that subtract from an assistive, harmonious environment. We conducted anticipatory ethnography to enable people to imagine harmonious ecosystems that integrate speculative objects and their personal devices. Through activities we explored how participants might interact with future ecosystems within their daily routines. In this paper, we present a framework for embodied state as a central dimension from which to connect human motion and cognitive circumstance within the context of space and time. We find the need for substantial specialization in device ecosystems that bridge ambient and interactive spaces, and we present the notion of cognitive onloading for symmetrically explaining information distribution.

South Asia faces one of the largest gender gaps online globally, and online safety is one of the main barriers to gender-equitable Internet access [GSMA, 2015]. To better understand the gendered risks and coping practices online in South Asia, we present a qualitative study of the online abuse experiences and coping practices of 199 people who identified as women and 6 NGO staff from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, using a feminist analysis. We found that a majority of our participants regularly contended with online abuse, experiencing three major abuse types: cyberstalking, impersonation, and personal content leakages. Consequences of abuse included emotional harm, reputation damage, and physical and sexual violence. Participants coped through informal channels rather than through technological protections or law enforcement. Altogether, our findings point to opportunities for designs, policies, and algorithms to improve women's safety online in South Asia.

Buildings and urban spaces increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence and new forms of interactivity, raising a wide span of research questions about the future of human experiences with, and within, built environments. We call this emerging area Human-Building Interaction (HBI) and introduce it as an interdisciplinary domain of research interfacing Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with Architecture and Urban Design. HBI seeks to examine the involvement of HCI in studying and steering the evolution of built environments. Therefore, we need to ask foundational questions such as the following: what are the specific attributes of built environments that HCI researchers should take into account when shifting attention and scale from “artefacts” to “environments”? Are architecture and interaction design methods and processes compatible? Concretely, how can a team of interaction designers bring their tools to an architectural project, and collaborate with other stakeholders? Can and will architecture change the theory and practice of HCI? Furthermore, research in HBI should produce knowledge and practical guidelines by experimenting novel design instances that combine architecture and digital interaction. The primary aim of this article is to specify the mission, vision, and scope of research in HBI. As the introductory article to the TOCHI special issue, it also provides a summary of published manuscripts and describes their collective contribution to the development of this field.

Many case studies illustrate unintended consequences of well-intentioned systems. We have seen problems caused by information "filter bubbles"; problems caused by inappropriate, discriminatory or outright dangerous recommendations; issues of poor data quality leading to erroneous conclusions; and lack of clear methods, techniques, and tools for understanding how systems work and how to undo or reverse problems that have been caused.

Multi-device product designers need tools to better address ecologically valid constraints in naturalistic settings early in their design process. To address this need, we created a reusable design kit of scenarios, "hint" cards, and a framework that codifies insights from prior work and our own field study. We named the kit the Moving Context Kit, or McKit for short, because it helps designers focus on context shifts that we found to be highly influential in everyday multi-device use. Specifically, we distilled the following findings from our field study in the McKit: (1) devices are typically specialized into one of six roles during parallel use notifier, broadcaster, collector, gamer, remote, and hub, and (2) device roles are influenced by context shifts between private and shared situations. Through a workshop, we validated that the McKit enables designers to engage with complex user needs, situations, and relationships when incorporating novel multi-device techniques into the products they envision.

Creativity is often associated with free expression, dynamic innovation, originality, and insightful, unconstrained genius. Nowhere is this more so than in the practice of design. The embodiment of this myth is the genius designer, from whom creative ideas spring forth naturally, effortlessly. A companion myth within the world of interface and interaction design is that design and user experience experimentation are not allies in creativity; rather, user experience research is in service of creativity, laying the foundations for design inspiration by identifying "gaps" and "needs", or providing summative evaluations of designs.

We present a qualitative study of the digital privacy and security motivations, practices, and challenges of survivors of intimate partner abuse (IPA). This paper provides a framework for organizing survivors' technology practices and challenges into three phases: physical control, escape, and life apart. This three-phase framework combines technology practices with three phases of abuse to provide an empirically sound method for technology creators to consider how survivors of IPA can leverage new and existing technologies. Overall, our results suggest that the usability of and control over privacy and security functions should be or continue to be high priorities for technology creators seeking ways to better support survivors of IPA.

Over the last decade, the idea of a “quantified self” has become increasingly well-known (Swan, 2013). The main premise is to collect and reflect on data about oneself in order to gain new insights...

As the number of computing devices available to users continues to grow, personal computing increasingly involves using multiple devices together. However, support for multi-device interactions has fallen behind users' desire to leverage the diverse capabilities of the devices that surround them. In this paper, we report on an interview study of 29 designers and developers in which we investigate the barriers to creating useful, usable, and delightful multi-device experiences. We uncovered three key challenges: 1) the difficulty in designing the interactions between devices, 2) the complexity of adapting interfaces to different platform UI standards, and 3) the lack of tools and methods for testing multi-device user experiences. We discuss the technological and business factors behind these challenges and potential ways to lower the barriers they impose.

Secondhand fashion is a rapidly growing, lucrative market with both off- and online outlets. Studies of secondhand consumption have focused primarily on people's motivations for secondhand shopping, highlighting sustainability and/or thrift. We extend this work by looking at the motivations and practices of secondhand shoppers who are driven instead by style, playfulness and treasure-hunting. We present findings from ethnographic observation and interviews with 13 secondhand shoppers. Three secondhand shopping orientations emerged. Perfection Seeking involves seeking items that fit with an individual look or personal brand. These items are seen as unique, and demonstrate an alternative to mainstream fashion and consumption. Casual curiosity is less focused, more engaged in browsing, and driven by both secondhand objects and the secondhand experience itself. Digging involves the focused pursuit of hidden "gems" or treasures, following the belief that unusual items are waiting to be found. We offer ideas for designing secondhand shopping experiences to support the needs for storytelling, experiential pleasure, and negotiation around durable value.

Self-representation online can be difficult for those who are in life transitions that involve exploring new identity facets and changes in personal style. Many desire to tailor their online representations for different audiences. Social media site profiles and sharing settings offer varying levels of anonymity, privacy, and thus safety, but these settings are often opaque and poorly understood. To understand the complex relationship between identity, personal style and online self-representation, we examine how people explore and experiment with new styles in public and in private online settings during gender transition. We present the results of interviews with transgender people who have recently reinvented their personal style, or are planning to do so in the near future. We find that people explore new styles in online settings to craft possible or ideal future selves. When involving others, people engage intimate and unknown others, but often avoid weak ties. Our results indicate that to account for changing identities, social media sites must be designed to support finding inspiration and advice from strangers and style experimentation with close friends.

There are several definitions of personalization but one that relates specifically to internet technologies is the following: Personalization technology enables the dynamic insertion, customization or suggestion of content in any format that is relevant to the individual user, based on the user's implicit behavior and preferences, and explicitly given details.

The potential for user-relevant, context-appropriate, targeted advertising on mobile devices is enormous given device improvements and advances in personal and location-based data collection. However, little is known about how users experience display advertisements ('ads') on mobile devices, or what factors drive mobile ad effectiveness. In this paper, we investigate users' experiences of display advertising on mobile devices. We consider three factors that are often studied in desktop settings the ad's level of personal relevance to the user, its relevance to the page content, and within-ad properties, with a particular focus on the level of animation in the ad. Our findings reveal a few surprises. First, personal relevance to the user has little or no impact on ad efficacy measured by recall. Instead, content relevance boosts ad recall. Second, user relevance leads to a more pleasant and interesting experience, but content relevance has no effect. Third, contrary to the popular notion that animation often leads to more effective ads by garnering more user attention, we find that a simple type of animation, such as blinking animation, negatively affects user experience and reduces ad recall. Our findings, while focused on advertising, offer insights for design of mobile content presentation in general.

No abstract available.

Previous studies have used mouse tracking as a tool to measure usability of webpages, user attention and search relevance. In this paper, we go beyond measurement of user behavior to prediction of the resulting user experience from mouse patterns alone. Specifically, we identify mouse markers that can predict user frustration and reading struggles at reasonably high accuracy. We believe that mouse-based prediction of user experience is an important advance, and could potentially offer a scalable way to infer user experience on the web. In addition, we demonstrate that mouse tracking could be used for applications such as evaluating content layout and content noticeability; we apply this in particular to advertisements. More generally, it could be used to infer user attention in complex webpages containing images, text and varied content, including how attention patterns vary with page layout and user distraction.

As user-generated Web content increases, the amount of inappropriate and/or objectionable content also grows. Several scholarly communities are addressing how to detect and manage such content: research in computer vision focuses on detection of inappropriate images, natural language processing technology has advanced to recognize insults. However, profanity detection systems remain flawed. Current list-based profanity detection systems have two limitations. First, they are easy to circumvent and easily become stale - that is, they cannot adapt to misspellings, abbreviations, and the fast pace of profane slang evolution. Secondly, they offer a one-size fits all solution; they typically do not accommodate domain, community and context specific needs. However, social settings have their own normative behaviors - what is deemed acceptable in one community may not be in another. In this paper, through analysis of comments from a social news site, we provide evidence that current systems are performing poorly and evaluate the cases on which they fail. We then address community differences regarding creation/tolerance of profanity and suggest a shift to more contextually nuanced profanity detection systems.

As mobile devices are enhanced with more sensors, powerful embedded cameras, and increased processing power and features, new user experiences become possible. A good example is the recent emergence of Augmented Reality (AR) applications that are designed for personal use while people are on-the-go. However, designing effective and usable AR experiences for mobile devices poses challenges for the design process. In this paper we outline reasons why simulating a compelling, mobile AR experience with sufficient veracity for effective formative design is a challenge, and present our work on prototyping and evaluation techniques for mobile AR. An experiment within the context of an ongoing design project (Friend Radar) is presented along with resulting findings and guidelines. We reflect on the benefits and drawbacks of low, mixed and high fidelity prototypes for mobile AR by framing them into a set of analytic categories extracted from the existing literature on prototyping and design.

New multimedia applications, such as community-created video repositories and tools for synchronous sharing, have revolutionized the ways that media is watched and shared. Effective instrumentation of these applications can enable researchers and system designers to better understand how video is being consumed: that is, how it is being watched, shared, augmented with annotations and otherwise experienced by individuals, by groups, and crowds. In addition to consuming content, however, people also talk about it. Conversational exchanges around video content can take place within applications (e.g., in chat spaces) and/or using separate communication channels (e.g., microblogs). We propose that the actions of these video viewers, with the video object itself and/or with each other around the video object, provide rich data for understanding the semantics and social relevance of various pieces of video content. We illustrate this approach with current research and a novel taxonomy of social multimedia interaction.

Abstract As online communities grow and the volume of user‐generated content increases, the need for community management also rises. Community management has three main purposes: to create a positive experience for existing participants, to promote appropriate, socionormative behaviors, and to encourage potential participants to make contributions. Research indicates that the quality of content a potential participant sees on a site is highly influential; off‐topic, negative comments with malicious intent are a particularly strong boundary to participation or set the tone for encouraging similar contributions. A problem for community managers, therefore, is the detection and elimination of such undesirable content. As a community grows, this undertaking becomes more daunting. Can an automated system aid community managers in this task? In this paper, we address this question through a machine learning approach to automatic detection of inappropriate negative user contributions. Our training corpus is a set of comments from a news commenting site that we tasked Amazon Mechanical Turk workers with labeling. Each comment is labeled for the presence of profanity, insults, and the object of the insults. Support vector machines trained on these data are combined with relevance and valence analysis systems in a multistep approach to the detection of inappropriate negative user contributions. The system shows great potential for semiautomated community management.

Categorization of online videos is often treated as a tag suggestion task; tags can be generated by individuals or by machine classification. In this paper, we suggest categorization can be determined socially, based on people's interactions around media content without recourse to metadata that are intrinsic to the media object itself. This work bridges the gap between the human perception of genre and automatic categorization of genre in classifying online videos. We present findings from two internet surveys and from follow-up interviews where we address how people determine genre classification for videos and how social framing of video content can alter the perception and categorization of that content. From these findings, we train a Naive Bayes classifier to predict genre categories. The trained classifier achieved 82% accuracy using only social action data, without the use of content or media-specific metadata. We conclude with implications on how we categorize and organize media online as well as what our findings mean for designing and building future tools and interaction experiences.

This paper explores key issues people experience managing personal boundaries within and across social technologies. We look in particular at email and online social networks. We offer a theoretical framework for understanding the errors in assumptions about the singularity of identity that are currently inscribed into the sharing models of social technology systems. Through a questionnaire study we examine how people facet their identities and their lives, and how these facets are expressed through use of email and Facebook. We found family was an extremely important context for sharing online, and that email was still a preferred form of communication for private sharing across facets of life. Single, working men had the highest level of incompatible facets, and a higher level of facet incompatibility was correlated with increased email usage and worry about sharing in the context of social networks.

Internet search engines display understanding or misunderstanding of user intent in and through the particular batches of results they retrieve and their perceived relevance. Yet understanding is not simply an automatic outcome but a joint interactional achievement between human and machine. If potential troubles with search queries emerge, either the user or the search engine may initiate repair on the query in ways that resemble repair in human conversation as described in conversation analysis. Users can repair their own queries in first or third position, while search engines can initiate repair from second position. However search-engine interactions currently contain no fourth-position repair. Finally search engines may also complete queries collaboratively with users in ways that are similar to but distinct from repair. In this study we examine interactions between users and search engines using a novel approach we call "computer interaction analysis," which utilizes eye-tracking screen video and a novel notation scheme for transcribing it.

A microblogged stream is delivered over time, providing an ongoing commentary of topics, trends, and issues. In this article, we present two methods of finding temporal topics within these Twitter streams. Using a normalized term frequency, we demonstrate how an effective table of contents can be extracted by finding localized "peaky topics". Second, we find "persistent conversations" which have a lower general salience but sustain and persist over the tweet corpus, in effect the whispering conversation that lingers in the background. These methods are demonstrated on a Twitter corpus of 53,000 tweets and a second Twitter corpus of 1.1 million tweets; the methods are generalizable to apply to any normalized scoring metric across a temporal corpus. We propose our method's implications on social media research and systems from a textual and social network analysis perpective.

With the rapid evolution of mobile devices, smart-phones in particular, comes the ability to create new experiences that enhance the way we see, interact, and express ourselves, within the world that surrounds us. We can blend data from our senses and our devices in myriad ways that simply weren't possible before. This workshop explores the current and future state of Mobile Augmented Reality. We will promote discussion about issues and opportunities in the space. We will explore potential for innovation and opportunities for collaboration between researchers working on augmented reality. We envision a lively discussion on the different approaches, challenges and benefits that may arise from the use of mobile Augmented Reality in the near future from an HCI perspective. We also aim at fostering new collaborations and establishing a research agenda within the field of mobile augmented reality.

Journal Article IwC Special Issue "Feminism and HCI: New Perspectives" Special Issue Editors' Introduction Get access Shaowen Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, United States Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Elizabeth F. Churchill Elizabeth F. Churchill Yahoo! Research, United States Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Interacting with Computers, Volume 23, Issue 5, September 2011, Pages iii–xi, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0953-5438(11)00089-0 Published: 01 September 2011

Back in the heady days of 1999 and WWW8 (Toronto) we held a panel titled "Finding Anything in the Billion Page Web: Are Algorithms the Key?" In retrospect the answer to this question seems laughably obvious - the search industry has burgeoned on a foundation of algorithms, cloud computing and machine learning. As we move into the second decade of this millennium, we are confronted with a dizzying array of new paradigms for finding content, including social networks and location-based search and advertising. This panel pulls together senior experts from academia and the major search principals to debate whether search will continue to look anything like the 2-keywords-give-10-blue-links paradigm that Google has popularized. What do emerging approaches and paradigms - natural language search, social search, location-based search - mean for the future of search in general?

Abstract In this article, the authors develop hypotheses about three key correlates of attitudes about discretionary online behaviors and control over one's own online information: frequency of engaging in risky online behaviors, experience of an online adverse event, and the disposition to be more or less trusting and cautious of others. Through an analysis of survey results, they find that online adverse events do not necessarily relate to greater overall Web discretion, but they do significantly associate with users' perceptions of Web information control. However, the frequencies with which individuals engage in risky online activities and behaviors significantly associate with both online discretion and information control. In addition, general dispositions to trust and be cautious are strongly related to prudent Internet behavior and attitudes about managing personal online information. The results of this study have clear consequences for our understanding of behaviors and attitudes that might lead to greater online social intelligence, or the ability to make prudent decisions in the presence of Internet uncertainties and risks. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

This panel will discuss group processes that promote social creativity in science, engineering, arts, and humanities. We will offer positive and negative examples of social creativity projects, while suggesting research directions for dramatically increased social participation. The goal is to develop strategies that would expand resources and opportunities for research and education in social creativity. This requires our community to develop a unified position, then reach out to national science funding agencies, while building the case for the importance of this topic beyond our own community. How can social creativity, collaborative discovery, distributed innovation, and collective intelligence be framed as an international priority to cope with the problems of the 21st century and how can we identify a clear set of research challenges?

Communicating the subtleties of a craft technique, like putting a zipper into a garment or throwing a clay pot, can be challenging even when working side by side. Yet How-To content - including text, images, animations, and videos - is available online for a wide variety of crafts. We interviewed people engaged in various crafts to investigate how online resources contributed to their craft practice. We found that participants sought creative inspiration as well as technical clarification online. In this domain, keyword search can be difficult, so supplemental strategies are used. Participants sought information iteratively, because they often needed to enact their knowledge in order to evaluate it. Our description of people learning how allows us to elaborate existing understandings of information-seeking behavior by considering how search originates and is evaluated in knowledge domains involving physical objects and physical processes.

Research on Web mashups and visual languages share an interest in human-centered computing. Both research communities are concerned with supporting programming by everyday, technically inexpert users. Visual programming environments have been a focus for both communities, and we believe that there is much to be gained by further discussion between these research communities. In this paper we explore some connections between web mashups and visual languages, and try to identify what each might be able to learn from the other. Our goal is to establish a framework for a dialog between the communities, and to promote the exchange of ideas and our respective understandings of human-centered computing.

An emerging trend in Social Networking sites and Web portals is the opening up of their APIs to external application developers. For example, the Facebook Platform, Google Gadgets and Yahoo! Widgets allow developers to design their own applications, which can then can be integrated with the platform and shared with other users. However, current APIs are targeted towards developers with programming expertise and database knowledge; they are not accessible to a large class of users who do not have a programming/database background, but would nevertheless like to create new applications. To address this need, we have developed the AppForge system, which provides a WYSIWYG application development platform. Users can graphically specify the components of webpages inside a Web browser, and the corresponding database schema and application logic will be automatically generated on the fly by the system. The WYSIWYG interface gives instantaneous feedback on what users have created and allows them to run, test and continuously refine their applications. AppForge has been used to create prototype versions of a variety of applications such as an event planning system, a recruiting system, an item trading system and an online course management system. We have also conducted a small and preliminary user study to identify and fix some of the usability aspects of AppForge.

Plasma Posters are large screen, digital, interactive poster-boards situated in public spaces, designed to facilitate informal content sharing within teams, groups, organizations and communities. While interest i interactive community poster boards has grown recently, few successful examples have been reported. In this paper we describe an ongoing installation of Plasma Posters within our organization, and report qualitative and quantitative data from 20 months of use showing the Posters have become an integral part of information sharing, complementing email and Web-based sharing. Success factors include our design process, the reliability and flexibility of the technology and the social setting of our organization. We briefly describe three external installations of the Plasma Poster Network in public places. We then reflect on content posting as "information staging" and the ways in which the public space itself becomes part of the "interface" to content.

There are a variety of digital tools for enabling people who are separated by time and space to communicate and collaborate on shared interests and tasks. The widespread use of some of these tools, such as instant messaging and group chat, coupled with the increasingly widespread availability of wireless access to the Internet (WiFi), have created new opportunities for using these collaboration tools by people sharing physical spaces in real time. The use of these tools to augment face-to-face meetings has created benefits for some participants and distractions-and detractions-for others. Our panelists will discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of these emerging uses of collaborative tools.

In this paper, we describe the YeTi information sharing system that has been designed to foster community building through informal digital content sharing. The YeTi system is a general information parsing, hosting and distribution infrastructure, with interfaces designed for individual and public content reading. In this paper we describe the YeTi public display interface, with a particular focus on tools we have designed to provide lightweight awareness of others' interactions with posted content. Our tools augment content with metadata that reflect people's reading of content - captured video clips of who's reading and interacting with content, tools to allow people to leave explicit freehand annotations about content, and a visualization of the content access history to show when content is interacted with. Results from an initial evaluation are presented and discussed.

We introduce the AttrActive Windows user interface, a novel approach for presenting interactive content on large screen, interactive, digital, bulletin boards. Moving away from the desktop metaphor, AttrActive Windows are dynamic, non-uniform windows that can appear in different orientations and have autonomous behaviours to attract passers-by and invite interactions.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

This paper describes an application-independent tool called Anchored Conversations that brings together text-based conversations and documents. The design of Anchored Conversations is based on our observations of the use of documents and text chats in collaborative settings. We observed that chat spaces support work conversations, but they do not allow the close integration of conversations with work documents that can be seen when people are working together face-to-face. Anchored Conversations directly addresses this problem by allowing text chats to be anchored into documents. Anchored Conversations also facilitates document sharing; accepting an invitation to an anchored conversation results in the document being automatically uploaded. In addition, Anchored Conversations provides support for review, catch-up and asynchronous communications through a database. In this paper we describe motivating fieldwork, the design of Anchored Conversations, a scenario of use, and some preliminary results from a user study.

No abstract available.

The development of tools to support synchronous communications between non-collocated colleagues has received considerable attention in recent years. Much of the work has focused on increasing a sense of co-presence between interlocutors by supporting aspects of face-to-face conversations that go beyond mere words (e.g. gaze, postural shifts). In this regard, a design goal for many environments is the provision of as much media-richness as possible to support non-collocated communication. In this paper we present results from our most recent interviews studying the use of a text-based virtual environment to support work collaborations. We describe how such an environment, though lacking almost all the visual and auditory cues known to be important in face-to-face conversation, has played an important role in day-to-day communication. We offer a set of characteristics we feel are important to the success of this text-only tool and discuss issues emerging from its long-term use.