Bruno Kocher

Innovation Sequences over Iterated Offerings: A Relative Innovation, Comfort, and Stimulation Framework of Consumer Responses

Innovations commonly involve changes to iterated market offerings (e.g., new games, car models, film sequels). To better understand consumer iteration responses, the authors develop and test a theoretical framework grounded in (1) prior innovations serving as reference states (comparators) for later innovations and (2) consumer desires for both comfort and stimulation. In Study 1s online game, prior innovations and loss aversion (greater loss than gain impact) moderate evaluations of current innovations, whereby an introduction-weaker-stronger innovation sequence (Periods 1–3 of four periods) generates more entertainment than an introduction-stronger-weaker sequence because the formers weak-opening-then-rise does less harm than the latters strong-opening-then-drop. Study 2 replicates Study 1 and shows that an introduction-weaker-weaker sequence produces enough habituation and diminishing negative returns to outperform an introduction-stronger-weaker sequence at Period 4. Study 3 offers marketplace corroboration with a film industry test in which minor (fewer) innovations perform better (e.g., sales, return on investment) earlier in franchises, whereas major (many) innovations perform better later, thereby reconciling prior researchs opposing prescriptions for the use of major versus minor sequel innovations. The framework and results implicate carefully sequenced innovations for managing consumer iteration responses, including the possibility of interspersing weaker/minor innovations among stronger/major innovations.

Speakup in the classroom: anonymous temporary social media for better interactions

Student participation in class is an important aspect of the learning experience, and can provide valuable feedback for teachers. However, getting students to interact in large classrooms is challenging. This paper presents SpeakUp, a mobile temporary social media app, confined in time and space that aims to improve interactions in classrooms. In SpeakUp, teachers can create temporary chat rooms accessible to students located nearby. Students can then anonymously post messages, which can be rated up or down by others. Our evaluation results (with a class of 300 students over the course of a semester) show that temporary social media can be used as an effective tool to improve classroom interactions by providing: (i) confined classroom-like here & now interactions to foster adoption, (ii) anonymity to increase participation and (iii) social media rating for highlighting interesting content. Students appear to use SpeakUp not solely for asking questions but also as a general backchannel, which can result in spam.

Fostering Knowledge Sharing in NGOs

Non-Governmental Organizations in the humanitarian field are particularly knowledge intensive structures. However, they often fail to manage this knowledge efficiently and thus waste resources repeating avoidable mistakes. Providing adequate incentives for knowledge sharing is a central issue in any knowledge management system and is still largely unresolved. In this position paper, we advocate for advances on the topic and lay out a research agenda to address the issue.

Gamifying Knowledge Sharing in the Humanitarian Context

Knowledge management is particularly important in humanitarian organization operating in situations of emergency. One of the challenges in designing systems to support knowledge management is to increase knowledge sharing. In this research-in-progress we explore attitudes of humanitarian workers of Médecins Sans Frontières towards knowledge sharing and propose novel designs to visualize individual and group contributions on a knowledge management system.

DinerRouge: Bringing Wealth and Income Inequality to the Table through a Provocative UX

Income and wealth inequality is one of the important social issues of the last decade. Nevertheless, it is rarely discussed through the lense of Human Computer Interaction. In this paper, we aim at investigating how a provocative user experience can contribute to engaging users when it comes to issues about wealth and income inequality. More precisely, we present the design of DinerRouge, a novel mobile application that can spark income inequality discussion by providing a provoking way to split the bill in restaurants based on income. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of DinerRouge with 78 participants which convey the fact that DinerRouge is usable, provocative and informative. Finally, we present open research question to guide future investigations.