Jennifer Thom-Santelli

Deception and design: the impact of communication technology on lying behavior

Social psychology has demonstrated that lying is an important, and frequent, part of everyday social interactions. As communication technologies become more ubiquitous in our daily interactions, an important question for developers is to determine how the design of these technologies affects lying behavior. The present research reports the results of a diary study, in which participants recorded all of their social interactions and lies for seven days. The data reveal that participants lied most on the telephone and least in email, and that lying rates in face-to-face and instant messaging interactions were approximately equal. This pattern of results suggests that the design features of communication technologies (e.g., synchronicity, recordability, and copresence) affect lying behavior in important ways, and that these features must be considered by both designers and users when issues of deception and trust arise. The implications for designing applications that increase, decrease or detect deception are discussed.

Social tagging roles: publishers, evangelists, leaders

Social tagging systems provide users with the opportunity to employ tags in a communicative manner. To explore the use of tags for communication in these systems, we report results from 33 user interviews and employ the concept of social roles to describe audience-oriented tagging, including roles of community-seeker, community-builder, evangelist, publisher, and team-leader. These roles contribute to our understanding of the motivations and rationales behind social tagging in an international company, and suggest new features and services to support social software in the enterprise.

What's mine is mine: territoriality in collaborative authoring

Territoriality, the expression of ownership towards an object, can emerge when social actors occupy a shared social space. In the case of Wikipedia, the prevailing cultural norm is one that warns against ownership of ones work. However, we observe the emergence of territoriality in online space with respect to a subset of articles that have been tagged with the Maintained template through a qualitative study of 15 editors who have self-designated as Maintainers. Our participants communicated ownership, demarcated boundaries and asserted their control over artifacts for the sake of quality by appropriating existing features of Wikipedia. We then suggest design strategies to support these behaviors in the proper context within collaborative authoring systems more generally.

Mobile Social Software: Facilitating Serendipity or Encouraging Homogeneity?

Mobile social systems can offer heterogeneous views of cities rather than encouraging users to socialize with people they already know and privileging consumption- and entertainment-based urban experiences.

Imprints of place: creative expressions of the museum experience

Personalization and social awareness, important aspects in the definition of a place, are traditionally overlooked in the design of technology for museums. We describe Imprints, a system to enhance the role of visitor participation beyond information receiver to active creator of sense of place. Overall response to the Imprints system is explored through interviews and log analysis of use. Despite some usability issues, response to the system was positive, and it was appropriated for both personalization and awareness of others. The results suggest an opportunity to introduce technology that plays with the dynamic between private expression and public presence in the traditional environment of the art museum.

Return On Contribution (ROC): A Metric for Enterprise Social Software

The value of enterprise social media applications, components, and users is difficult to quantify in formal economic terms such as Return On Investment. In this work we propose a different approach, based on human service to other humans. We describe a family of metrics, Return On Contribution (ROC), to assist in managing social software systems. ROC focuses on human collaboration, namely the creation and consumption of information and knowledge among employees. We show how ROC can be used to track the performance of several types of social media applications, and how ROC can help to understand the usage patterns of items within those applications, and the performance of employees who use those applications. Design implications include the importance of “lurkers” in organizational knowledge exchange, and specific types of measurements that may be of value to employees, managers, and system administrators.

Organizational acculturation and social networking

For large global enterprises, providing adequate resources for organizational acculturation, the process in which employees learn about an organizations culture, remains a challenge. We present results from a survey of 802 users from an enterprise social networking site that identifies two groups of employees (new to the company and geographically distant from headquarters) that perceive higher benefit from using a SNS to learn about the organizations values and beliefs. In addition, we observe regional differences in viewing behaviors between two groups of new employees. These results suggest that a SNS can also potentially contribute to the information-seeking and sense-making activities that underlie organization acculturation.

Taming the situationist beast

The interplay between arts and HCI has become increasingly commonplace in the past years, offering new opportunities for approaching interaction, but also raising challenges in integrating methods and insights from across a great disciplinary divide. In this paper, we examine the ways Situationist art practice has been used as an inspiration for HCI design. We argue that methods from Situationist art practice have often been picked up without regard for their underlying sensibility: reflection and improvisation in an activist socio-political context. We describe an experiment in incorporating Situationist sensibility in design and use it to elucidate the challenges that face HCI in truly integrating the arts.

Beyond just the facts: transforming the museum learning experience

We present Museum Detective, a handheld system designed for use by school children to encourage guided learning through paired discovery of one object in an art museum. Initial analysis showed that children were able to use the devices cooperatively and exhibited longer-term retention of information about the artifacts in the gallery. We propose that the design of the Museum Detective interface can be refined to further encourage students to actively transform their museum learning experience.

Characterizing global participation in an enterprise SNS

Social networking sites have been deployed within global enterprises to encourage informal communication and build social capital between its globally distributed members. Such interactions can potentially contribute to intercultural learning opportunities; however, it is unclear whether cross-geographical social contact consistently occurs. We present initial results from a quantitative analysis of user activity from a global enterprise SNS, observe asymmetries in directionality and reciprocity in connections in various geographic regions as well as a strong tendency towards geographic homophily. Finally, we suggest that language proficiency may play a role in differences in regional adoption of the system.