Crowdsourcing is a new value creation business model. Annual revenue of the Chinese market alone is hundreds of millions of dollars, yet few studies have focused on the practices of the Chinese crowdsourcing workforce, and those that do mainly focus on solo crowdworkers. We have extended our study of solo crowdworker practices to include crowdfarms, a relatively new entry to the gig economy: small companies that carry out crowdwork as a key part of their business. We report here on interviews of people who work in 53 crowdfarms. We describe how crowdfarms procure jobs, carry out macrotasks and microtasks, manage their reputation, and employ different management practices to motivate crowdworkers and customers.

Human-Computer Integration (HInt) is an emerging paradigm in which computational and human systems are closely interwoven. Integrating computers with the human body is not new. however, we believe that with rapid technological advancements, increasing real-world deployments, and growing ethical and societal implications, it is critical to identify an agenda for future research. We present a set of challenges for HInt research, formulated over the course of a five-day workshop consisting of 29 experts who have designed, deployed and studied HInt systems. This agenda aims to guide researchers in a structured way towards a more coordinated and conscientious future of human-computer integration.

This joint panel between UIST and CSCW brings together leading researchers at the intersection of the conferences-systems researchers in collaborative and social computing-to engage in a discussion and retrospective. Pairs of panelists will represent each decade since the founding of the conferences, sharing a brief retrospective that surveys the most influential papers of that decade, the zeitgeist of the problems that were popular that decade and why, and what each decade's work has to say to the decades that came before and after. The panel is intended as a space to celebrate advances in the field, and reflect on the burdens and opportunities that it faces ahead.

What began as a quest for artificial general intelligence branched into several pursuits, including intelligent assistants developed by tech companies and task-oriented chatbots that deliver more information or services in specific domains. Progress quickened with the spread of low-latency networking, then accelerated dramatically a few years ago. In 2016, task-focused chatbots became a centerpiece of machine intelligence, promising interfaces that are more engaging than robotic answering systems and that can accommodate our increasingly phone-based information needs. Hundreds of thousands were built. Creating successful non-trivial chatbots proved more difficult than anticipated. Some developers now design for human-chatbot (humbot) teams, with people handling difficult queries. This paper describes the conversational agent space, difficulties in meeting user expectations, potential new design approaches, uses of human-bot hybrids, and implications for the ultimate goal of creating software with general intelligence.

This paper focuses on the fifth year of a cross-sectional trend study of enterprise social networking. Several stable patterns are evident--some activities have plateaued, others steadily increase in frequency. The fifth year did see a new development: As social networking companies visibly embraced behavior tracking and targeted advertising, concerns shifted from boundary regulation within personal networks to unsettling evidence of activity monitoring. However, benefits of use continue to outweigh drawbacks.

We conducted four annual comprehensive surveys of social networking at Microsoft between 2008 and 2011. We are interested in how employees use these tools and whether they consider then useful for organizational communication and information-gathering. Our study is longitudinal and based on random sampling. Between 2008 and 2011, social networking went from being a niche activity to being very widely and heavily used. Growth in use and acceptance was not uniform, with differences based on gender, age and level (individual contributor vs. manager). Behaviors and concerns changed, with some showing signs of leveling off.

Despite the common use of mobile computing devices to communicate and access information, the effects of peripheral computing tasks on people's attention is not well understood. Studies that have identified consequences of multitasking in diverse domains have largely focused on influences on productivity. We have yet to understand perceptions and preferences regarding the use of computing devices for potentially extraneous tasks in settings such as presentations at seminars and colloquia. We explore costs and attitudes about the use of computing devices by people attending presentations. We find that audience members who use devices believe that they are missing content being presented and are concerned about social costs. Other attendees report being less offended by multitasking around them than the device users may realize.

The use of social networking software by professionals is increasing dramatically. How it is used, whether it enhances or reduces productivity, and how enterprise-friendly design and use might evolve are open questions. We examine attitudes and behaviors in a large, technologically-savvy organization through a broad survey and thirty focused interviews. We find extensive social and work uses, with complex patterns that differ with software system and networker age. Tensions arise when use spans social groups and the organization's firewall. Although use is predominantly to support weak ties whose contribution to productivity can be difficult to prove, we anticipate rapid uptake of social networking technology by organizations.

In 1997, Brian Shackel published the article “Human–Computer Interaction – Whence and Whither?” In this early foray into historical reflection on the field, past work is covered with a focus on identifying European contributions, issues of particular contemporary interest are explored, and a set of 10-year predictions are offered. In this essay, from a vantage-point of an additional decade of history, insights of lasting value that Professor Shackel was uniquely positioned to glean are identified. His work is placed in the broader context now available, and an always-useful reminder of the difficulty of anticipating future events is provided.

The difficult task of providing access to shared objects is, typically, carried out individually by access authorizers. We motivate and explain here the idea of using distributed collaborative environments to perform this activity. In these environments, the initiative in distributing access rights to shared objects can be taken by information guardians, information consumers, and tools that act as agents of the guardians and consumers. Information consumers are responsible for sending access requests to information guardians; their agents (partially or completely) automate this task for them. Information guardians are responsible for authorizing accesses; their agents automate this task for them. The agents interact with collaborative and communication tools, which must be extended to support the new access-control paradigm.

We conducted two studies of communication: an ethnographic study of communication primarily in homes, cars, and public places, and a survey of communication in a large corporation. A clear pattern emerged. To a greater degree than expected in the ethnographic study, people were familiar with a broad range of communication tools. Awareness and a lack of anxiety was the norm even for tools that a person rarely or had not yet used. As a result, people frequently shifted to the tool that was most appropriate for a task at hand. The resulting behaviors conflict with popular press images and have implications for the designers of communication tools.

This paper considers the complexity of measuring the return on investment for technology adoption. A brief case study of technology adoption in a large design and construction firm provides a clear view of factors that came into play. The technology considered is simple; the apparent costs and benefits are relatively clear. Four parties are involved: diverse employees interested in using dual monitors, the information technology support group in the organization, an executive who had worked his way up from drafting, and employees of a software company that is considering expanding its support for dual monitor use. In the construction company, a seemingly logical and inexpensive hardware upgrade was subject to a wide range of technical and social pressures, some obstructing and others promoting adoption. Decisions are made in a manner that did not fit the model held by the product planners and designers in the software company.

This essay summarizes the editor's views of publication in the field of human-computer interaction. Digital technologies have begun changing the way journal articles and conference papers are produced, reviewed, published, accessed, and used. This period of profound change presents challenges and opportunities for both new and existing channels of scientific and technical communication.

Our goal is to help automate the capture and broadcast of lectures to remote audiences. There are two inter-related components to the design of such systems. The technology component includes the hardware (e.g., video cameras) and associated software (e.g., speaker-tracking). The aesthetic component embodies the rules and idioms that human videographers follow to make a video visually engaging. We present a lecture room automation system and a substantial number of new video-production rules obtained from professional videographers who critiqued it. We also describe rules for a variety of lecture room environments differing in the numbers and types of cameras. We further discuss gaps between what professional videographers do and what is technologically feasible today.

Information retrieval is generally considered an individual activity, and information retrieval research and tools reflect this view. As digitally mediated communication and information sharing increase, collaborative information retrieval merits greater attention and support. We describe field studies of information gathering in two design teams that had very different products, disciplinary backgrounds, and tools. We found striking similarities in the kinds of information they sought and the methods used to get it. For example, each team sought information about design constraints from external sources. A common strategy was to propose ideas and request feedback, rather than to ask directly for recommendations. Some differences in information seeking and sharing reflected differences in work contexts. Our findings suggest some ways that existing team collaboration tools could support collaborative information retrieval more effectively.

Notification and shared annotations go hand-in-hand. Notification of activity in a shared document system is known to support awareness and improve asynchronous collaboration, but few studies have examined user needs and explored design tradeoffs. We examined large-scale use of notifications in a commercial system and found it lacking. We designed and deployed enhancements to the system, then conducted a field study to gauge their effect. We found that providing more information in notification messages, supporting multiple communication channels through which notifications can be received, and allowing customization of notification messages are particularly important. Overall awareness of annotation activity on software specifications increased with our enhancements

Software today does not help us partition our digital worlds effectively. We must organize them ourselves. This field study of users of multiple monitors examines how people with a lot of display space arrange information. Second monitors are generally used for secondary activities related to principal tasks, for peripheral awareness of information that is not the main focus, and for easy access to resources. A second monitor improves efficiency in ways that are difficult to measure yet can have substantial subjective benefit. The study concludes with illustrations of shortcomings of today's systems and applications: the way we work could be improved at relatively low cost.

Three public spaces frequency used by members of a single organization who are distributed across different floors of two buildings were linked by constantly-running video and audio connections. We discuss the design of the system, including issues in providing low-latency, full-duplex audio-video connectivity, ways to increase possibilities for interaction while addressing privacy concerns, and the introduction of the system to the community. We report on responses to the system and lessions learned, including unexpected issues, such as creative decorations of the spaces and assertions by a vocal minority of employees about the private nature of “public space.”

Many psychological studies have shown that when we act, and especially when we interact, we consciously and unconsciously attend to context of many types. Sensors can pick up some but not all context that is acquired through our senses. Some context is lost, some is added, and captured context is presented in new ways. Digital aggregators and interpreters do not aggregate and interpret the same way we do. Missing or altered context disrupts our processing of information in ways that we may not recognize. To address the disruption we may use additional sensors to capture and deliver some of the missing context. Learning to handle these new conduits is then a further source of disruption, and on it can go. With greater knowledge of context, we can work and interact more efficiently, assuming that we can learn to take advantage of the information without being overwhelmed. However, converting contextual information to a digital format changes it in specific ways. Transient information becomes more permanent, local information is made available globally, and information that once spread slowly can spread much more quickly. The information can enable us to work more efficiently, but these changes in its nature have profound indirect effects. The potential loss of privacy is widely discussed, but other effects may be more significant. In particular, the loss of confinement and transience of information creates an environment that is fundamentally unnatural, in conflict with the one we evolved to live in.

As more audio and video technical presentations go online, it becomes imperative to give users effective summarization and skimming tools so that they can find the presentation they want and browse through it quickly. In a previous study, we reported three automated methods for generating audio-video summaries and a user evaluation of those methods. An open question remained about how well various text/image only techniques will compare to the audio-video summarizations. This study attempts to fill that gap.

The current generation of desktop computers and networks are bringing streaming audio and video into widespread use. A small investment allows presentations or lectures to be multicast, enabling passive viewing from offices or rooms. We surveyed experienced viewers of multicast presentations and designed a lightweight system that creates greater awareness in the presentation room of remote viewers and allows remote viewers to interact with each other and the speaker. We report on the design, use, and modification of the system, and discuss design tradeoffs.

Previous research on Tutored Video Instruction (TVI) shows that learning is enhanced when small groups of students watch and discuss lecture videos together. Using specialized, high-end videoconferencing systems, these improved results have been shown to apply even when the students are in different locations (Distributed TVI, or DTVI). In this paper, we explore two issues in making DTVI-like scenarios widely supported at low cost. First, we explore design of a system that allows distributed individuals to collectively watch video using shared VCR controls such as play, pause, seek, stop. We show how such a system can be built on top of existing commercial technologies. Second, we explore the impact of four alternative discussion channels on student learning and interaction behavior. The four channels-text chat, audioconferencing, videoconferencing, and face-to-face-have differing infrastructure requirements and costs. Our lab studies show that while text chat does not work, there is no significant difference in discussion behavior and learning between audioconferencing and videoconferencing. While lab studies have their limitations and long-term field studies need to be done, the preliminary results point to a low-cost way for a DTVI-like model to be deployed widely in the very near future.

Digital web-accessible annotations are a compelling medium for personal comments and shared discussions around documents. Only recently supported by widely used products, "in-context" digital annotation is a relatively unexamined phenomenon. This paper presents a case study of annotations created by members of a large development team using Microsoft Office 2000-approximately 450 people created 9,000 shared annotations on about 1,250 documents over 10 months. We present quantitative data on use, supported by interviews with users, identifying strengths and weaknesses of the existing capabilities and possibilities for improvement.

Increasingly often, presentations are given before a live audience, while simultaneously being viewed remotely and recorded for subsequent viewing on-demand over the Web. How should video presentations be designed for web access? How is video accessed and used online? Does optimal design for live and on-demand audiences conflict? We examined detailed behavior patterns of more than 9000 on-demand users of a large corpus of professionally prepared presentations. We find that as many people access these talks on-demand as attend live. Online access patterns differ markedly from live attendance. People watch less overall and skip to different parts of a talk. Speakers designing presentations for viewing on-demand should emphasize key points early in the talk and early within each slide, use slide titles that reveal the talk structure and are meaningful outside the flow of the talk. In some cases the recommendations conflict with optimal design for live audiences. The results also provide guidance in developing tools for on-demand multimedia authoring and use.

With the proliferation of online multimedia content and the popularity of multimedia streaming systems, it is increasingly useful to be able to skim and browse multimedia quickly. A key technique that enables quick browsing of multimedia is time-compression. Prior research has described how speech can be time-compressed (shortened in duration) while preserving the pitch of the audio. However, client-server systems providing this functionality have not been available.

As streaming audio-video technology becomes widespread, there is a dramatic increase in the amount of multimedia content available on the net. Users face a new challenge: How to examine large amounts of multimedia content quickly. One technique that can enable quick overview of multimedia is video summaries; that is, a shorter version assembled by picking important segments from the original.

Goals and content: To provide an organized and entertaining overview of the world fo CSCW for newcomers to the field. We will offer a framework for understanding CSCW as a research domain, a management opportunity, and a business challenge. We will analyze some of the great successes and great disasters in CSCW.

Goals and content: This tutorial draws on the experiences of the participants and instructors with groupware and workflow technologies, and with CSCW issues and methods, to construct an informed picture of what is happening and possible.

The development of human-computer interfaces was studied in two large software product development organizations. Researchers joined development projects for approximately one month and participated in interface design while concurrently interviewing other project participants and employees, recording activity in meetings and on electronic networks, and otherwise observing the process. The two organizations differed in their approaches to development, and, in each case, the approach differed in practice from the model supported by the organizational structure. Development practices blocked the successful application of accepted principles of interface design. The obstacles to effective design that results from people noticing and being affected by interface changes, and a lack of communication among those sharing responsibility for different aspects of the interface.

We describe the evolution of the novel shared drawing medium ClearBoard which was designed to seamlessly integrate an interpersonal space and a shared workspace. ClearBoard permits coworkers in two locations to draw with color markers or with electronic pens and software tools while maintaining direct eye contact and the ability to employ natural gestures. The ClearBoard design is based on the key metaphor of “talking through and drawing on a transparent glass window.” We describe the evolution from ClearBoard-1 (which enables shared video drawing) to ClearBoard-2 (which incorporates TeamPaint, a multiuser paint editor). Initial observations and findings gained through the experimental use of the prototype, including the feature of “gaze awareness,” are discussed. Further experiments are conducted with ClearBoard-0 (a simple mockup), ClearBoard-1, and an actual desktop as a control. In the settings we examined, the ClearBoard environment led to more eye contact and potential awareness of collaborator's gaze direction over the traditional desktop environment.

Article Integration of inter-personal space and shared workspace: ClearBoard design and experiments Share on Authors: Hiroshi Ishii View Profile , Minoru Kobayashi View Profile , Jonathan Grudin View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '92: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative workDecember 1992 Pages 33–42https://doi.org/10.1145/143457.143459Online:01 December 1992Publication History 92citation1,201DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations92Total Downloads1,201Last 12 Months10Last 6 weeks2 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

We are developing a conceptual framework and a demonstration system for collaboration among members of design teams when direct communication among these members is impossible or impractical. Our research focuses on the long-term, indirect communication needs of project teams rather than the short-term needs of face-to-face communication or electronic mail. We address these needs with integrated, domain-oriented design environments. Our conceptual framework and our system-building efforts address two major issues: (a) How does individual work blend into project work (especially in large projects that span great distances and time)? and (b) What role do the work objects play in this coordination? We use a specific domain-oriented design environment (NETWORK-HYDRA—for the design of computer networks) to illustrate our approach, and we discuss HYDRA as the underlying domain-independent, multifaceted architecture for design environments.

It is notoriously difficult to separate the function of interactive software from its form, to draw a line between software functionality and its human-computer interface. Nevertheless, two research communities exist in the USA, one focused on information system functionality and organizational impact, the other on human-computer dialogues or ‘user interfaces’ to systems and applications. These communities largely draw from different systems development contexts: in-house or internal development and off-the-shelf product development, respectively. Each has its own core set of issues, theoretical constructs and terminologies. The histories of these research and development communities are summarized, points of contact are identified and their possible evolution is suggested.

article Free AccessConsistency, standards, and formal approaches to interface development and evaluation: a note on Wiecha, Bennett, Boies, Gould, and Greene Author: Jonathan Grudin University of California, Irvine University of California, IrvineView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Information SystemsVolume 10Issue 1Jan. 1992 pp 103–111https://doi.org/10.1145/128756.128760Published:02 January 1992Publication History 15citation644DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations15Total Downloads644Last 12 Months60Last 6 weeks8 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 SiteeReaderPDF

Article Free Access Share on CSCW: the convergence of two development contexts Author: Jonathan Grudin Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, DenmarkView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '91: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1991 Pages 91–97https://doi.org/10.1145/108844.108858Published:01 March 1991Publication History 22citation1,024DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations22Total Downloads1,024Last 12 Months43Last 6 weeks12 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 SiteeReaderPDF

Many poor interface features are the result of carelessness, ignorance, or neglect in the development process. For these features, methods such as user involvement in iterative design with prototyping, the use of check lists and guidelines, and even formal evaluation can be of great help. However, there are strong forces present in development environments that block the use of such methods and distort interface designs in a systematic way. Because these forces serve legitimate goals, such as making a design simpler, more easily communicated, or more marketable, they are more difficult to counter; because developers are skilled at working toward those goals, the tangential effects on the interface usually pass unnoticed. This descriptive, empirical article describes these forces in the context of large organizations developing commercial off-the-shelf software products. Most points are supported by examples and by a logical argument. Not all of the phenomena may appear in a given development organization, but the overall picture of a complex environment in which interface development requires unwavering attention is quite general.

This paper presents a view of system design that shows how good engineering practice can lead to poor user interfaces. From the engineer's perspective, the ideal interface reflects the underlying mechanism and affords direct access to the control points of the mechanism. The designer of the user interface is often also the designer of the mechanism (or at least is very familiar with the mechanism), and thus has a strong bias toward basing the interface on the engineering model. The user, however, wants to complete a task, and an interface that is based on the task is often more appropriate than one based on the system mechanism. We discuss these issues, and also discuss where to position the user interface between the poles of the engineering model and the task model.

This paper examines the evolution of the focus of user interface research and development from the first production of commercial computer systems in the 1950s through the present. The term “user interface” was not needed in the beginning, when most users were engineers and programmers; it may again become inappropriate when more applications are written for groups than for individuals. But there is a continuity to the outward movement of the computer's interface to its external environment, from hardware to software to increasingly higher-level cognitive capabilities and finally to social processes. As the focus shifts, the approaches to design and the skills required of practitioners changes. In this paper five foci or levels of development are identified. Most development today is positioned in the third level and considerable research is directed at the fourth. Some attention is now being given to the fifth: repositioning the interface in the work group or organization itself. Work at the different levels is not entirely independent, so establishing a comprehensive framework may enable us to position existing research and development efforts and plan future work more effectively.

Terror.You have to confront the documentation.You have to learn a whole new language.Did you ever use the word 'interface' before you started using a computer?"--Advertising executive Arthur Einstein' interface: . . .a: the place at which independent systems meet and act upon or communicate with each other b: the means by which interaction or communication is efected at an interface --Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary

This report describes some of the results of a survey constructed to address the multidisciplinary, collaborative nature of user interface design as it is practiced in large software development organizations today. Survey forms were prepared for Software Engineers, Human Factors Engineers, Industrial Design Engineers, Technical Writers, Training Developers, and Marketing representatives. The survey was filled out by over 200 designers from multiple sites within 7 large companies. Previous interview studies of user interface design have relied on far smaller samples taken primarily from single organizations, and have focused on the individual designer's perspective, primarily that of programmers or software engineers. While surveys have limitations as information-gathering tools, the findings in this report suggest specific places where organizational change or tool development might improve the coordination or communication among the different professionals and managers who contribute to interface design in large company settings.

Approaches to integrating human factors or user interface knowledge and expertise with software development are still exploratory and evolving. The human-computer interface provides a broader range of user interface challenges than earlier technology, but human factors is only now starting to be widely recognized as a distinct discipline requiring integration with system development. Devoting human and computer resources to user interface enhancement has been considered a luxury, and in many places still is, but the falling cost of computational power and the growing user resistance to poor interfaces, as well as a rising need for product differentiation in the marketplace, insure that human factors will become a necessity where it has not already. The need to develop organizational approaches to support the integration of human factors or user interface expertise with product development is thus a relatively new concern. The integration problems that have been identified include some that are shared with more established support activities such as technical writing, and others that are particular to human factors or result from the relative unfamiliarity of the discipline.

Article Free Access Share on Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the design and evaluationof organizational interfaces Author: Jonathan Grudin MCC, 3500 West Balcones Center Drive, Austin, Texas MCC, 3500 West Balcones Center Drive, Austin, TexasView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '88: Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative workJanuary 1988 Pages 85–93https://doi.org/10.1145/62266.62273Published:01 January 1988Publication History 502citation9,179DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations502Total Downloads9,179Last 12 Months582Last 6 weeks82 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 SiteeReaderPDF

Human factors professionals are not completely free to support the optimization of user interface design within the time span of individual software development projects. Interface design is constrained by conservative forces, such as the expectations of users of existing systems in the installed base and emerging de facto or formal standards. At the same time, human factors involvement with a particular product may ultimately have its greatest impact on future product releases. In this paper we explore an expanded time line for influencing product design. This time line brings middle- and upper-management concerns into focus, revealing critical opportunities for effectively positioning and applying human factors resources.

Skills developed by software user interface designers to solve problems in communication, management, implementation, and other areas may influence design decisions in the absence of sufficient knowledge of user populations. Given today's rapid change in both “faces” to the software interface — user populations and software functionality — the first pass at a design may be made without sufficient understanding of the relevant goals and behaviors of the eventual users. Without this information, designers are less able to grasp “user logic”, and may rely on more familiar “logics” that are useful in other problem-solving arenas. Understanding how these approaches can affect a design may help us recognize them across a wide range of contexts and enable us to focus the human factors contribution to the design evolution process.