Collab-Or-Ate

Luis Suarez, an IBM employee and one of our earliest and most enthusiastic Beehive users, has an article in the New York Times this week where he shares his amazing story: I freed myself from email’s grip. Luis has replaced his regular use of business email with phone calls, instant messaging, his wikis, his blog, and Beehive. There an interesting set of comments in response to his article on Lifehacker.

It is exciting that Luis sees our social network site Beehive as part of his set of critical business communication tools. Part of his reason for this is that Beehive is a public forum where he can answer things once, rather than many individual times.

My primary hypothesis as to why Luis and other employees are excited about checking their Beehive profile page and dread their email inboxes is that while the email inbox is one huge, enormous, always-growing to-do list, a social networking site is by definition social and there is a much lower level of obligation to reply or do anything in response to messages on the site. In many cases, there is no expectation to reply to that “friend request” or that friendly comment on your family photo. You are free to enjoy the environment and contribute content and comments when the mood strikes, and that is it. Who wouldn’t want to hang out there, as compared to within their piles of email?

If someone asks you something within Beehive that is 100% about work, it is similar to when a colleague asks you about the project while you are on your way to get coffee. You are available and willing to hear the question. You can defer the question or even ignore it, but in all likelihood your colleague is likely to get a response from you because you are in a context of being social, open and friendly.

So, can, should, or will social networking sites replace email? They can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t because they aren’t task-oriented inboxes. Employees crave an obligation-free communication environment, which is why they flock (buzz) to Beehive. And while they are there, sharing with each other, there many instances where the topics turn to business and real work gets done. But if social networking sites replace email, they wouldn’t be any fun any more!

With the election season is in full swing, I’m reminded of this interesting experiment run by Bailenson, et al, at Stanford just before the 2004 presidential election:

One week before the 2004 presidential election, participants completed a survey of their attitudes concerning George Bush and John Kerry while viewing photographs of both candidates side by side (See Figure 1). For a random one-third of the subjects, their own faces were morphed with Kerry while unfamiliar faces were morphed with Bush. For a different one-third, their own faces were morphed with Bush while unfamiliar faces were morphed with Kerry. The remaining one-third of the sample viewed un-morphed pictures of the candidates.

Post-experiment interviews demonstrated that not a single person detected that his or her image had been morphed into the photograph of the candidate. Participants were more likely to vote for the candidate morphed with their own face than the candidate morphed with an unfamiliar face. The effects of facial identity capture on candidate support were concentrated among weak partisans and independents; for ‘card carrying’ members of the Democratic and Republican parties, the manipulation made little difference. [more]

We have more affinity for people we perceive to be more like us and subtle changes to a person’s picture have the power to make us like someone more or less. So be a critical consumer of not just the words but also the images of the candidates! Resist the temptation to vote based on gut feelings about affinity and similarity, because these factors can be easily manipulated.

Today’s WSJ has an article about keeping track of all of your friends’ activities on different social networking sites: Social Services: Lots of sites let you keep track of your friends. The problem now is keeping track of all the ways to keep track.

I was kind of surprised by the article: basically this space of social aggregators hasn’t changed much in the past 12 months. Spokeo is the most viable option and it has been running for at least a year. But have you heard of it before? The problem of keeping track of your friends’, family’s, and colleagues’ activities keeps getting more and more complicated with everyone now joining multiple sites. (”Did you post your status on Facebook or Twitter?” “I looked for that picture you mentioned…. is it on your blog or flickr?”)

Maybe the reason a single browser aggregator isn’t dominating this space is that people are pushing updates to other applications, either mobile or RSS readers. That’s at least my solution. Or just not keep track :).

NYTimes Bits: Big Changes Coming to Profile Pages on Facebook

“The changes come as Facebook aims to simplify its user pages, which have become as cluttered with applications, photos and information as pages on MySpace — long criticized by visual purists as being a bit too visually chaotic.

The changes come amid indications that growth at Facebook might be tailing off. According to a recent report from Nielsen Online, 22.4 million users visited Facebook in April, down from 24.9 million in March. Overall year-over-year growth slowed to 56 percent from last year’s 98 percent growth rate.”

I’m definitely looking forward to this clean up (see the article for details)! As I collect more and more Facebook friends I’m having a hard time getting anything useful out of looking at their profiles. What I’d really like to do is to subscribe to feeds of my friends’ photos and comments, so I can cut through the clutter using my RSS Reader. Anyone have an idea how to do that? I have a feed to my friends’ status messages and am enjoying that.

The Associated Press wrote an article that talks about our social networking project Beehive: Next generation of business software could get more fun:

You can tell just from looking at the Beehive program under development at IBM Corp. that something is different. Beehive’s color scheme is bright yellow, not IBM’s standard blue. The cheerfulness reflects the fact that Beehive is meant to encourage far-flung co-workers to like each other more.

Beehive is an online portal for employees to describe their expertise, so valuable knowledge doesn’t get lost inside the bureaucracy. Those kinds of tools are common, but Beehive adds an unusual dose of Facebook or MySpace. The 27,000 IBMers using Beehive can post pictures, video and one-sentence updates about themselves. They can share lists of “things I can’t live without.”

Such personal touches often are missing when people work at a distance from one another, says Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher developing Beehive. Co-workers in different locales can’t wander into each other’s offices and see family pictures on the desk. They don’t shop at the same places or have children in the same schools.

These tidbits, DiMicco believes, help people understand each other better. And the usual communication tools like e-mail, instant messaging, phones and even videoconferencing do only so much to fill the gap.

The Associated Press: Next generation of business software could get more fun
USA Today: Virtual apps try to build camaraderie, productivity
CNN: ‘Virtual watercooler’ makes workplace more fun
Washington Post: Next generation of business software could get more fun
Red Orbit: Virtual Communities Boost Employee Productivity

While at CHI last month (our international conference on human-computer interaction (HCI)), I went to two panels (”Celebrating ‘The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction’” and “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful?“) that had really interesting discussions about what defines our research conference (CHI) and our field of study (HCI). I’m still synthesizing my thoughts around these panels and what I’ve been reading since, but based on them, here is how I think about the HCI field today:

1. The HCI field (and the CHI conference) began in the 1980’s with a strong grounding in computer science and cognitive science. Card, Newell, and Moran’s The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction is considered the seminal textbook describing this approach.
2. Computer science and cognitive science guide us towards taking a systematic, scientific approach to building and evaluating software (for e.g. GOMS). This is a solid way to build systems and many of the early successful HCI research projects utilized this approach.
3. As the software and consumer electronics industries exploded over the last two decades, it has become obvious that there is something more going on here driving user adoption, in addition to computer science innovation and cognitive science usability. You could summarize this as “design” or “context” or “the third paradigm.” However you describe it, it has to do with human emotions, social dynamics and desire.
4. As Greenberg pointed out in his paper presentation, evaluating an early prototype in a systematic way, particularly in terms of usability, can kill the innovation process. Early design often gets things wrong, but it is a critical stage in the product innovation cycle and should not be stunted through rigorous evaluation. He claims that inappropriate evaluation is harming the quality of the work presented at CHI — read Greenberg and Buxton’s paper for more details.
5. The CHI community is struggling to find an identity that simultaneously supports a scientific process (so that there is a criteria for judging quality) and product innovation (so that CHI has an influence over the technology world, outside of academics).
6. The paper The Three Paradigms of HCI (Harrison, S. Tatar, D. and Sengers, P.) tries to define exactly what this “third” thing is that is missing from our traditional HCI education, calling it the “phenomenological matrix.” Research practices this third paradigm include are ethnography, action research, practice-based research, and interaction analysis, where the “goal is to grapple with the full complexity around the system.”
7. Because I’ve been working within the space of design, social psychology, and “context” for so long, this approach to building technology seems so logical, yet surprisingly hard to justify to CHI paper reviewers. But on the other hand, my response should not be to reject the CHI’s body of work as misguided or uninformed. I think a rejection of stringent evaluation techniques should not lead to a rejection of the innovations that have been born out of this structure.
8. My conclusion from this is that I should read more, spending time becoming more aware of and inspired by the work done before us. I’m all in favor of coming up with alternative evaluation methods or no evaluation criteria so that we can foster risky, exciting ideas within HCI. But I don’t want to abandon all the early work’s ideas.

Some Recommended Readings:


The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, Stuart K. Card, Thomas P. Moran, Allen Newell

Twenty-five years ago, Card, Moran and Newell’s book, “The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction”, named our field and launched us into a new world of user-centered design and development. These pioneers believed that “a scientific psychology should help us in arranging [the human-computer] interface so it is easy, efficient, error-free – even enjoyable.”

Saul Greenberg & Bill Buxton’s paper “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time).“

Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done ‘by rule’ rather than ‘by thought’. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision. If done to validate an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design’s scientific worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today’s reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow’s eager acceptance. The choice of evaluation methodology - if any - must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration.

The Three Paradigms of HCI, S Harrison, D Tatar, P Sengers

Informal histories of HCI commonly document two major intellectual waves that have formed the field: the first orienting from engineering/human factors with its focus on optimizing man-machine fit, and the second stemming from cognitive science, with an increased emphasis on theory and on what is happening not only in the computer but, simultaneously, in the human mind. In this paper, we document underlying forces that constitute a third wave in HCI and suggest systemic consequences for the CHI community. We provisionally name this the ‘phenomenological matrix’. In the course of creating technologies such as ubiquitous computing, visualization, affective and educational technology, a variety of approaches are addressing issues that are bad fits to prior paradigms, ranging from embodiment to situated meaning to values and social issues. We demonstrate the underlying unity of these approaches, and document how they suggest the centrality of currently marginal criteria for design, evaluation, appreciation, and developmental methodology in CHI work.

Thomas Erickson, David W. McDonald’s new book, HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community

From Tom Erickson’s web page:

The goal of the HCI Remixed project is to produce a collection of essays in which researchers and practitioners reflect on a paper or other piece of work by someone else, that is at least 10 years old, and that has had a personal impact on their view of or approach to HCI.

A mention of Beehive on BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting: IBM’s del.icio.us: A big hit and also on the Intranet Blog: Could Facebook be a real intranet? IBM is onto something…

“The research goal of Beehive is to aid IBMers with various people-centric challenges within the workplace. We broadly categorize these challenges into “relationship building” and “people-sensemaking”.

Relationship-building challenges include, for example, new employees struggling with making connections that are important for their current project and professional growth, remote workers having difficulties with team building and staying in touch with their team members, or employees moving on to new assignments who are not easily able to stay touch with former colleges.

People-sensemaking includes, for example, the difficulties of discovering people with the right skills and common interests, or learning more about someone personally as well as professionally to facilitate making contact, or getting to know about ongoing projects and activities beyond your immediate team.”

Only a month away!

Walking through the Frankfurt airport I couldn’t help but stop in wonder at this advertisement. There is no diversity in age, color, or gender and apparently that should make me want to invest my money with them?


In case you didn’t get a good look at those names and faces:

Spied this while buying replacement clothes in Scotland. (No, I didn’t buy it.) I guess Facebook has taken off in Scotland! Who knew this is the “tshirt everyone is talking about.”

I just got home from a long trip. It included my passport expiring while I flew over the Atlantic, my luggage vanishing into thin air after 10 days of being told it would arrive “tomorrow,” and a severely delayed Italian train causing me to end up spending the night at an airport motel in Frankfurt, Germany. Although I love to travel, this time I have never been so glad to return home!





A few things I learned on this trip to Europe:

1. Not all airport immigration officers or airline check-in agents check the expiration dates on passports. I got through Boston and Frankfurt and to the UK border (at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5) before anyone noticed that my passport expired the day before. (Technically it was valid when I took off on March 30th, and invalid when I landed March 31st.)




2. Apparently the airline that lets on a passenger with an expired passport gets fined £2000 ($US 4000).




3. You aren’t supposed to travel internationally with a passport expiring within 6 months, but trust me: you can definitely fly like this and no one will make any comments about it.




4. You can get an “emergency passport” made within a day at a US Consulate office. Bring your passport application and passport photos that comply with US passport photo requirements (not the requirements of the country you are in) and a credit card. If you are in this situation, hopefully you are in a country where they are polite and the office is open at a time when you are able to get there. (For me, this was getting to Edinburgh on a Thursday between 9 and noon. And they were very polite about it.) An emergency passport is valid for 1 year.




5. When an airline loses your luggage, the rules about reimbursement are very shady and ever changing. The main thing I’ve learned is there is a limit to how much they will reimburse.




6. Apparently the only items in your luggage the airline will reimburse are clothes and toiletries. Not cameras, electronics or perishables. What’s up with that?? My poor Nikon D40 is what I really care about. I also had 8lbs of Bit O’ Honey in the bag, but that’s another story.




7. Primark, in the UK, is my new favorite store — the clothes are trendy and awesomely inexpensive. It is like H&M, but much cheaper! Have to admit though, my new wardrobe is already falling apart, but it looked cool for that 1 week…




8. It is so much easier to travel when you don’t have luggage! And after living this way for almost 3 weeks, I now believe one does not need more than 2 pairs of pants and 2 pairs of shoes, no matter what the purpose of your trip. I’ve heard that before, but now I will live it.




9. Mainland Europe is so over the shoes and liquids thing. When I went through airport security, all I needed to do was take my laptop out of my bag and take off my coat. What a treat!




10. The rumors are true: Italian trains do not run on time. A 2-hour train trip from Venice to Florence took 4.5 hours and at one point the train was actually moving backwards. I learned this is not considered a good excuse for missing your flight, according to your German airline. So I’ve learned that you should not rely on Italian transportation to get you to your airplane on time. Next time, build in at least a day buffer.




11. After spending much time in UK, Italian and German airports, I have to say the pastries are better in Germany’s, the coffee is better in Italy’s (duh), and mmmm, well, they are good at losing your bags at Heathrow. Another observation is that it is easier to buy a replacement phone charger in Germany, but it is half the price in the UK. I couldn’t find one in Florence’s airport.
    
    

12. The other rumors are true: the Dollar is doing horribly against the British Pound and the Euro. So if you are in the US, I advise you drop what you are doing right now and go shopping! (Now if only we had Primark…)

After all this negativity, I have to say, the trip wasn’t all bad: the first conference was interesting, the second conference was stimulating and fun to see lots of friends, and traveling afterwards in Italy with Mike was exciting as always. I also had fabulous meals throughout Italy.

And I got a camera phone picture of my new favorite store:

I am listening to Eric Baumer present this paper at CHI 2008. It seems fitting to blog while listening….

Baumer, E., M. Sueyoshi, B. Tomlinson. 2008. “Exploring the Role of the Reader in the Activity of Blogging.” In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008). Florence, Italy.

I think the paper will be available on Bill Tomlinson’s web page.

One of the interesting things Eric mentioned is that readers are much more forgiving of a blog of their friend than a blog of a stranger. They tolerate lame posts and poor visual design of friends, but not of strangers. (hmm, I hope I pass this stranger-test, but perhaps not always!) They also forgive erratic posting. I’m trying to fix that by posting this!

Both types of readers enjoy the random personal tidbits added to the otherwise professional blog, because it humanizes the blogger and makes the reader feel a personal connection to the blogger.

I recommend the paper based on his talk, and I definitely plan to read it.

Here’s my personal tidbit to keep you coming back for more… British Airways lost my luggage 9 days ago when I arrived in Scotland. I am now in Italy and have had to buy a new wardrobe, which is both excellent and kind of a pain. It has been quite an adventure and BA has been everything but helpful.

I am about to hit the road to present some research results.

Rosta Farzan, the PhD student intern who worked with our team last summer, has two papers on the incentive mechanism she deployed on Beehive. Rosta implemented a basic point system on the site where users earn points and move up through status levels as they contribute content to our social networking site. The results have been pretty dramatic! First, users added more content. Then users objected to the system. Then users started to game the system. Then users opt-outed of the system. Then users discussed the merits and weaknesses of the system. The list of our lessons learned grows by the week, which has made this research project extremely interesting. I can’t wait for Rosta to return to IBM this summer and implement a new type of incentive system, so we can see what drama unfolds when the rules of the game change.

Rosta (and she’s kindly sharing some of her presentation time with me) will be presenting the initial results of deploying the points system at the annual CHI conference. This year it is in Florence, Italy, yahoo!

R Farzan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, W Geyer, C Dugan. (2008) "Results from Deploying a Participation Incentive Mechanism within the Enterprise." Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

And prior to that, I will be in Aberdeen, Scotland, presenting the follow-up paper describing what happened after the initial experiment. This paper will be published at the Symposium on Persuasive Technology that is being held in conjunction with the AISB 2008 Convention on Communication, Interaction and Social Intelligence.

R Farzan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, W Geyer, C Dugan. (2008) "When the experiment is over: Deploying an incentive system to all the users." Symposium on Persuasive Technology, In conjunction with the AISB 2008 Convention, Aberdeen, Scotland, April 2008.

And it isn’t all about the point systems, either. I’m going to be participating in a CHI workshop on Sensemaking, to talk about “people sensemaking” with David Millen:

JM DiMicco, DR Millen. (2008) "People Sensemaking with Social Networking Sites." Sensemaking Workshop,Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

And Werner Geyer will be presenting another paper on Beehive that discusses everyone’s favorite social content type the “hive five”!

W Geyer, C Dugan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, M Muller. (2008) "Use and Reuse of Shared Lists as a Social Content Type." Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy, April 2008.

Study: Just Viewing Apple’s logo makes you creative and just viewing IBM’s logo makes you responsible

Isn’t research great?

It is that type of day where you mean to get some work done, but you first have to check out your blogs. Because checking blogs is kind of like getting work done, right? So of course I’ve spent half of Saturday catching up on politics and pop culture and not getting any work done. Unintentionally though I think I found something to help with my data analysis, which I swear I will get down to as soon as I finish this blog post!

On Lynn Cherny’s blog post about Colbert and book sales, I was admiring the data charts she posted from Juice Analytics. Turns out they have a bunch of tools and tips for making your chart-junky Excel charts look a wee bit better with a simple click of the button. I’ve downloaded their CleanCharts Excel Add-on and, when it works (kind of quirky), it works great. I also picked out the best of the charts in their Chart Chooser and downloaded those templates.

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