Alison Lee

Making web sites be places for social interaction

Technology can play an important role in enabling people to interact with each other. The Web is one such technology with the affordances for sharing information and for connecting people to people. In this paper, we describe the design of two social interaction Web sites for two different social groups. We review several related efforts to provide principles for creating social interaction environments and describe the specific principles that guided our design. To examine the effectiveness of the two sites, we analyze the usage data. Finally, we discuss approaches for encouraging participation and lessons learned.

Blending digital and physical spaces for ubiquitous community participation

Blurring the notional boundary between the digital and the physical in social activity spaces helps blend---and motivate---online and face-to-face community participation.

Browsers to support awareness and social interaction

Information sharing and social interaction are the Webs main features that have enabled online communities to abound and flourish. However, the Web is lacking cues and browsing mechanisms for the online social spaces. The challenge of creating social browsing tools to access such social information and patterns is of interest as a visual analytic problem for two reasons. Browsers that combine social visualizations and tools let newcomers and visitors explore information and patterns. Here we present social browsers for two Web communities. In addition to the novel visualizations and representation of two facets of a groups identity, our work has three other notable contributions.

Enhancing creative design via software tools

Why creative design is important.

Design, experiences and user preferences for a web-based awareness tool

We describe our experiences with the design, implementation, deployment and evaluation of a Portholes tool which provides group and collaboration awareness through the Web. The research objective was to explore as to how such a system would improve communication and facilitate a shared understanding among distributed development groups. During the deployment of our Portholes system, we conducted a naturalistic study by soliciting user feedback and evolving the system in response. Many of the initial reactions of potential users indicated that our system projected the wrong image so that we designed a new version that provided explicit cues about being in public and who is looking back to suggest a social rather than information interface. We implemented the new design as a Java applet and evaluated design choices with a preference study. Our experiences with different Portholes versions and user reactions to them provide insights for designing awareness tools beyond Portholes systems. Our approach is for the studies to guide and to provide feedback for the design and technical development of our system.

Scaffolding visually cluttered web pages to facilitate accessibility

Increasingly, rich and dynamic content and abundant links are making Web pages visually cluttered and widening the accessibility divide for the disabled and people with impairments. The adaptations approach of transforming Web pages has enabled users with diverse abilities to access a Web page. However, the challenge remains for these users to work with a Web page, particularly among people with minimal Web experience and cognitive limitations. We propose that scaffolding can allow users to learn certain skills that help them function online with greater autonomy. In the case of visually cluttered Web pages, several accessibility scaffoldings were created to enable users to learn where core content begins, how text flows in a part of a Web page, and what the overall structure of a Web page is. These scaffoldings expose the elements, pathways, and organization of a Web page that enable users to interpret and grasp the structure of a Web page. We present the concept of an accessibility scaffolding, the designs of the scaffoldings for visually cluttered pages, and user feedback from people who work with our target end-users.

Evolution of norms in a newly forming group

Norms are expected to make significant contributions towards enabling discourse in cyberspace among people of different backgrounds, just as they do in the physical world. Yet many distributed, electronically mediated groups fail to form norms successfully. Causes range from open discord to the more insidious lack of comfort people experience in groups that fail to openly address disagreements about what constitutes appropriate behavior in the online environment. We present a case study of the evolution of norms about what constitutes appropriate posts to an online discussion forum for a newly forming group. We trace the discussion sparked by a critical incident and show how a design of an online environment that promotes visibility of participants contributed towards overcoming the forces for dissolution and promoted progress towards coalescing as a group with a shared identity.

Enhancing web accessibility

This demonstration will illustrate the key technical and user interface aspects of the Web Adaptation Technology. Various transformations underlying the system will be shown that illustrate how this approach enables a wide range of users with reduced visual, cognitive, and motor abilities to access a large proportion of Web pages using a standard browser.

Developing collaborative applications on the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is often viewed as the latest and most user friendly way of providing information over the Internet (i.e., server of documents). It is not customarily viewed as a platform for developing and deploying applications. In this tutorial, we introduce, dcmonstrdtc, and discuss how Web technologies like CGI scripts. Javascript, and Java can bc used in combination with Web browsers to design, create, distribute and execute collaborative applications. We discuss constraints with the Web approach as well as recent extensions that support application development.

User experience of CLIVE/mbanx solution

The video illustrates how a customer logged in from home over a single phone line to a Web-based Internet banking self-service can invoke human assistance on demand using a customer care technology called CLIVE [1]. Once connected, the customer and the customer service representative (CSR) can speak with each other, interact with the contents of a shared Web page, and maintain awareness of each other’s location on the Web page.