Catherine Grevet

Design and Evaluation of a Social Visualization Aimed at Encouraging Sustainable Behavior

The environment is affected by our collective behavior, yet many visualizations of energy saving behavior focus on personal actions, or simple, unidimensional comparisons between individuals and groups. Based on past work in social psychology and in environmental visualization, we present a design space for social visualizations that considers issues such as anonymity, dimensionality, and competition vs. collaboration. We describe the design and implementation of a social visualization of energy saving behavior. This visualization goes beyond past examples in that it includes both uni-dimensional and multi-dimensional comparative feedback. It is designed to scale to a small group of dorms or a whole city. We evaluated our visualization in the context of a dorm competition at a small liberal arts college. While this was a preliminary study, it helps to provide formative data on the value of our visualization.

G-nome surfer: a tabletop interface for collaborative exploration of genomic data

Molecular and computational biologists develop new insights by gathering heterogeneous data from genomic databases and leveraging bioinformatics tools. Through a qualitative study with 17 participants, we found that molecular and computational biologists experience difficulties interpreting, comparing, annotating, sharing, and relating this vast amount of biological information. We further observed that such interactions are critical for forming new scientific hypotheses. These observations motivated the creation of G-nome Surfer, a tabletop interface for collaborative exploration of genomic data that implements multi-touch and tangible interaction techniques. G-nome Surfer was developed in close collaboration with domain scientists and is aimed at lowering the threshold for using bioinformatics tools. A first-use study with 16 participants found that G-nome Surfer enables users to gain biological insights that are based on multiple forms of evidence with minimal overhead.

Overload is overloaded: email in the age of Gmail

The term email overload has two definitions: receiving a large volume of incoming email, and having emails of different status types (to do, to read, etc). Whittaker and Sidner proposed the latter definition in 1996, noticing that email inboxes were far more complex than simply containing incoming messages. Sixteen years after Whittaker and Sidner, we replicate and extend their work with a qualitative analysis of Googles Gmail. We find that email overload, both in terms of volume and of status, is still a problem today. Our contributions are 1) updating the state of email overload, 2) extending our understanding of overload in the context of Gmail and 3) comparing personal with work email accounts: while work email tends to be status overloaded, personal email is also type overloaded. These comparisons between work and personal email suggest new avenues for email research.

Tensions in scaling-up community social media: a multi-neighborhood study of nextdoor

This paper presents a study of Nextdoor, a social media system designed to support local neighborhoods. While not the first system designed to support community engagement, Nextdoor has a number of attributes that make it distinct. Our study, across three communities in a major U.S. city, illustrates that Nextdoor inhabits an already-rich ecosystem of community-oriented social media, but is being appropriated by its users for use in different ways than these existing media. Nextdoor also raises tensions in how it defines the boundaries of neighborhoods, and in the privacy issues it raises among its users.

Managing political differences in social media

Most people associate with people like themselves, a process called homophily. Exposure to diversity, however, makes us more informed as individuals and as a society. In this paper, we investigate political disagreements on Facebook to explore the conditions under which diverse opinions can coexist online. Via a mixed methods approach comprising 103 survey responses and 13 interviews with politically engaged American social media users, we found that participants who perceived more differences with their friends engaged less on Facebook than those who perceived more homogeneity. Weak ties were particularly brittle to political disagreements, despite being the ties most likely to offer diversity. Finally, based on our findings we suggest potential design opportunities to bridge across ideological difference: 1) support exposure to weak ties; and 2) make common ground visible while friends converse.

Personal informatics in the wild: hacking habits for health & happiness

Personal informatics is a class of systems that help people collect personal information to improve self-knowledge. Improving self-knowledge can foster self-insight and promote positive behaviors, such as healthy living and energy conservation. The development of personal informatics applications poses new challenges in human-computer interaction and creates opportunities for applications in various domains related to quality of life, such as fitness, nutrition, wellness, mental health, and sustainability. This workshop will continue the conversations from the 3 previous CHI workshops through discussions on practical lessons from previous research and development experiences. In particular, this workshop will extend this ongoing work through a focus on rapid prototyping and deployment in the wild. Topics covered will include designing interfaces for collecting and reflecting on personal data, building robust applications, and infrastructures to make applications easier to create.

Piggyback Prototyping: Using Existing, Large-Scale Social Computing Systems to Prototype New Ones

We propose a technique we call piggyback prototyping, a prototyping mechanism for designing new social computing systems on top of existing ones. Traditional HCI prototyping techniques do not translate well to large social computing systems. To address this gap, we describe a 6-stage process for prototyping new social computing systems using existing online systems, such as Twitter or Facebook. This allows researchers to focus on what people do on their system rather than how to attract people to it. We illustrate this technique with an instantiation on Twitter to pair people who are different from each other in airports. Even though there were many missed meetings, 53% of survey respondents would be interested in being matched again, and eight people even met in person. Through piggyback prototyping, we gained insight into the future design of this system. We conclude the paper with considerations for privacy, consent, volume of users, and evaluation metrics.

I am what i eat: identity & critical thinking in an online health forum for kids

As kids encounter food advertisements, it is important that they be able to critically evaluate the messages claims, the healthiness of the promoted product and their desire for it. To explore how technology might help kids develop these skills, we created an online forum called TalkBack that encourages children to critically analyze the messaging in food ads and their attitudes towards marketed foods. We evaluated TalkBack with twenty-eight middle school students in a summer camp program. We discuss how participants appeared to project and protect their sense of self through their interaction with TalkBack. We also describe the limited analytic depth of their forum contributions and suggest directions for HCI research that attempts to encourage critical thinking and health promotion in adolescents.