Prior work in cross-cultural psychology and neuroscience has shown robust variations in visual attention patterns. People from East Asian societies, in which a holistic thinking style predominates, have been found to attend to contextual information in scenes more than Westerners, whose tendency to think analytically expresses itself in greater attention to foreground objects. This paper applies these findings to website design, using an online study to evaluate whether Japanese (N=65) remember more and are faster at finding contextual website information than US Americans (N=84). Our results do not support this hypothesis. Instead, Japanese overall took significantly longer to find information than US participants—a difference that was exacerbated by an increase in website complexity—suggesting that Japanese may holistically take in a website before engaging with detailed information. We discuss implications of these findings for website design and cross-cultural research.

Adapting the visual designs of websites to a local target audience can be beneficial, because such design localization increases users' appeal, trust, and work efficiency. Yet designers often find it difficult to decide when to adapt and how to adapt the designs, mainly because there are currently no guidelines that describe common website designs in various countries. We contribute the first large-scale analysis of 80,901 website designs across 44 countries, made available via an interactive web-based design catalog. Using computational image metrics to compare the ~2,000 most visited websites per country, we found significant differences between several design aspects, such as a website's colorfulness, visual complexity, the number of text areas and the average saturation of colors. Our results contribute a snapshot of web designs that users in 44 countries frequently see, showing that the design of websites with a global reach are more homogenized compared to local websites between countries.

Online experimentation with volunteers relies on participants' non-financial motivations to complete a study, such as to altruistically support science or to compare oneself to others. Researchers rely on these motivations to attract study participants and often use incentives, like performance comparisons, to encourage participation. Often, these study incentives are advertised using a slogan (e.g., "What is your thinking style?''). Research on framing effects suggests that advertisement slogans attract people with varying demographics and motivations. Could the slogan advertisements for studies risk attracting only specific users? To investigate the existence of potential sample biases, we measured how different slogan frames affected which participants self-selected into studies. We found that slogan frames impact recruitment significantly; changing the slogan frame from a 'supporting science' frame to a 'comparing oneself to others' frame lead to a 9% increase in recruitment for some studies. Additionally, slogans framed as learning more about oneself attract participants significantly more motivated by boredom compared to other slogan frames. We discuss design implications for using frames to improve recruitment and mitigate sources of sample bias in online research with volunteers.

Online experiments allow researchers to collect data from large, demographically diverse global populations. Unlike in-lab studies, however, online experiments often fail to inform participants about the research to which they contribute. This paper is the first to investigate barriers that prevent researchers from providing such science communication in online experiments. We found that the main obstacles preventing researchers from including such information are assumptions about participant disinterest, limited time, concerns about losing anonymity, and concerns about experimental bias. Researchers also noted the dearth of tools to help them close the information loop with their study participants. Based on these findings, we formulated design requirements and implemented Digestif, a new web-based tool that supports researchers in providing their participants with science communication pages. Our evaluation shows that Digestif's scaffolding, examples, and nudges to focus on participants make researchers more aware of their participants' curiosity about research and more likely to disclose pertinent research information.

StackExchange is a network of Question & Answer (Q&A) sites that support collaborative knowledge exchange on a variety of topics. Prior research found a significant imbalance between those who contribute content to Q&A sites (predominantly people from Western countries) and those who passively use the site (the so-called "lurkers"). One possible explanation for such participation differences between countries could be a mismatch between culturally related preferences of some users and the values ingrained in the design of the site. To examine this hypothesis, we conducted a value-sensitive analysis of the design of the StackExchange site Stack Overflow and contrasted our findings with those of participants from societies with varying cultural backgrounds using a series of focus groups and interviews. Our results reveal tensions between collectivist values, such as the openness for social interactions, and the performance-oriented, individualist values embedded in Stack Overflow's design and community guidelines. This finding confirms that socio-technical sites like Stack Overflow reflect the inherent values of their designers, knowledge that can be leveraged to foster participation equity.

Online experimentation with volunteers could be described as a form of citizen science in which participants take part in behavioral studies without financial compensation. However, while citizen science projects aim to improve scientific understanding, volunteer-based online experiment platforms currently provide minimal possibilities for research involvement and learning. The goal of this paper is to uncover opportunities for expanding participant involvement and learning in the research process. Analyzing comments from 8,288 volunteers who took part in four online experiments on LabintheWild, we identified six themes that reveal needs and opportunities for closer interaction between researchers and participants. Our findings demonstrate opportunities for research involvement, such as engaging participants in refining experiment implementations, and learning opportunities, such as providing participants with possibilities to learn about research aims. We translate these findings into ideas for the design of future volunteer-based online experiment platforms that are more mutually beneficial to citizen scientists and researchers.

Q&A sites currently enable large numbers of contributors to collectively build valuable knowledge bases. Naturally, these sites are the product of contributors acting in different ways - creating questions, answers or comments and voting in these - contributing in diverse amounts, and creating content of varying quality. This paper advances present knowledge about Q&A sites using a multifaceted view of contributors that accounts for diversity of behavior, motivation and expertise to characterize their profiles in five sites. This characterization resulted in the definition of ten behavioral profiles that group users according to the quality and quantity of their contributions. Using these profiles, we find that the five sites have remarkably similar distributions of contributor profiles. We also conduct a longitudinal study of contributor profiles in one of the sites, identifying common profile transitions, and finding that although users change profiles with some frequency, the site composition is mostly stable over time.

This paper describes our experience with SegHidro, a project that empowers hydro-meteorological researchers by (i) enabling collaborative work via the coupling of computer models, and (ii) providing access to massive grid-based computer resources. SegHidro researchers are geographically distributed and have different and sometimes complementary backgrounds. They have in common their interest over the Brazilian Northeast, a semi-arid region, where irregular rainfall distribution causes many problems to the population. SegHidro was created out of the need to help decision makers to better manage water resources. It relies on grid computing as the "glue" that sticks together the community resources: data, computing power and human expertise. Our experience has shown that simplicity is key for the adoption of a solution and its success. Thus SegHidro is built over a simple infrastructure in both computation and data