Duyen T. Nguyen

The Perverse Effects of Social Transparency on Online Advice Taking

Increasingly, the advice people receive on the Internet is socially transparent in the sense that it displays contextual information about the advice-givers or their actions. We hypothesize that activity transparency -seeing an advice givers process while creating his or her recommendations - will increase advice taking. We report three experiments testing the effect of activity transparency on taking mediocre advice. We found that the presence of a web history increased the likelihood of following a financial advisors advice and reduced participant earnings (Exp. 1), especially when the web history implied greater task focus (Exp. 2, 3). CSCW research usually emphasizes how to increase information sharing; this work suggests when shared information may be inappropriate. We suggest ways to counter activity transparencys potential downsides.

The Known Stranger: Supporting Conversations between Strangers with Personalized Topic Suggestions

Striking up a good conversation with new acquaintances is often a difficult problem. In this paper we report on the perceptions of wearable device users who were given real-time personalized topic suggestions during a conversation with a person they just met. Suggestions were generated using a ranking recommendation algorithm, and were delivered via Google Glasses. We conducted a study with 38 pairs of strangers, who received such suggestions while conversing for the first time. Participants found the suggestions to be helpful, but only at the right moments, and for certain types of speakers. Our results contribute to the understanding of how communication interventions influence peoples experience and behaviors, and enhance interpersonal interactions. Our study also presents design implications for applications on wearable devices to facilitate conversations between strangers.

Effects of Conversational Involvement Cues on Understanding and Emotions in Instant Messaging Conversations

In today’s multitasking workplace, conversations are often carried out amid other tasks. This article explores how multitasking affects people’s levels of involvement or engagement in their conversations, and how levels of involvement in turn influence people’s language, understanding, and affective responses to the conversation. We manipulated participants’ levels of involvement in instant messaging conversations using a distraction task (an online game). We found that the distraction task lowered communication involvement. In addition, higher levels of involvement (both of the participant and of the partner) had a positive effect on understanding, emotions, and satisfaction. Moreover, a partner’s verbal cues of involvement, such as assent words and definite articles, influenced participants’ communication outcomes. We conclude by suggesting design features that might allow people to maintain appropriate levels of involvement during instant messaging conversations.