Jinjuan Feng

Empathy and online interpersonal trust: A fragile relationship

The rapid growth of personal email communication, instant messaging and online communities has brought attention to the important role of interpersonal trust in online communication. An empirical study was conducted focusing on the effect of empathy on online interpersonal trust in textual IM. To be more specific, the relationship between empathic accuracy, response type and online interpersonal trust was investigated. The result suggests both empathic accuracy and response type have significant influence on online interpersonal trust. The interaction between empathic accuracy and response type also significantly influences online trust. Interestingly, the results imply a relationship between daily trust attitude and online interpersonal trust. People who are more trusting in their daily life may experience more difficulty in developing trust online. There is also some evidence to suggest that different communication scenarios may have an influence on online trust.

Usable security and privacy: a case study of developing privacy management tools

Privacy is a concept which received relatively little attention during the rapid growth and spread of information technology through the 1980s and 1990s. Design to make information easily accessible, without particular attention to issues such as whether an individual had a desire or right to control access to and use of particular information was seen as the more pressing goal. We believe that there will be an increasing awareness of a fundamental need to address privacy concerns in information technology, and that doing so will require an understanding of policies that govern information use as well as the development of technologies that can implement such policies. The research reported here describes our efforts to design a privacy management workbench which facilitates privacy policy authoring, implementation, and compliance monitoring. This case study highlights the work of identifying organizational privacy requirements, analyzing existing technology, on-going research to identify approaches that address these requirements, and iteratively designing and validating a prototype with target users for flexible privacy technologies.

Privacy in information technology: designing to enable privacy policy management in organizations

As information technology continues to spread, we believe that there will be an increasing awareness of a fundamental need to address privacy concerns, and that doing so will require an understanding of policies that govern information use accompanied by development of technologies that can implement such policies. The research reported here describes our efforts to design a system which facilitates privacy policy authoring, implementation, and compliance monitoring. We employed a variety of user-centered design methods with 109 target users across the four steps of the research reported here. This case study highlights the work of identifying organizational privacy requirements, iteratively designing and validating a prototype with target users, and conducting laboratory tests to guide specific design decisions to meet the needs of providing flexible privacy enabling technologies. Each of the four steps in our work is identified and described, and directions for future work in privacy are suggested.

Evaluating interfaces for privacy policy rule authoring

Privacy policy rules are often written in organizations by a team of people in different roles. Currently, people in these roles have no technological tools to guide the creation of clear and implementable high-quality privacy policy rules. High-quality privacy rules can be the basis for verifiable automated privacy access decisions. An empirical study was conducted with 36 users who were novices in privacy policy authoring to evaluate the quality of rules created and user satisfaction with two experimental privacy authoring tools and a control condition. Results show that users presented with scenarios were able to author significantly higher quality rules using either the natural language with a privacy rule guide tool or a structured list tool as compared to an unguided natural language control condition. The significant differences in quality were found in both user self-ratings of rule quality and objective quality scores. Users ranked the two experimental tools significantly higher than the control condition. Implications of the research and future research directions are discussed.

Computer Usage by Children with Down Syndrome: Challenges and Future Research

Children with Down syndrome, like neurotypical children, are growing up with extensive exposure to computer technology. Computers and computer-related devices have the potential to help these children in education, career development, and independent living. Our understanding of computer usage by this population is quite limited. Most of the software, games, and Web sites that children with Down syndrome interact with are designed without consideration of their special needs, making the applications less effective or completely inaccessible. We conducted a large-scale survey that collected computer usage information from the parents of approximately six hundred children with Down syndrome. This article reports the text responses collected in the survey and is intended as a step towards understanding the difficulties children with Down syndrome experience while using computers. The relationship between the age and the specific type of difficulties, as well as related design challenges are also reported. A number of potential research directions and hypotheses are identified for future studies. Due to limitations in survey methodology, the findings need to be further validated through hypothesis-driven, empirical studies.

Productivity, satisfaction, and interaction strategies of individuals with spinal cord injuries and traditional users interacting with speech recognition software

Abstract.Speech recognition is an important technology that is becoming increasingly effective for dictation-oriented activities. While recognition accuracy has increased dramatically in recent years, recent studies confirm that traditional computer users are still faster using a keyboard and mouse and spend more time correcting errors than dictating. Further, as these users become more experienced they frequently adopt multimodal strategies that require the keyboard and mouse when correcting errors. While speech recognition can be a convenient alternative for traditional computer users, it can be a powerful tool for individuals with physical disabilities that limit their ability to use a keyboard and mouse. However, research into the performance, satisfaction, and usage patterns of individuals with physical disabilities has not been reported. In this article, we report on a study that provides initial insights into the efficacy of existing speech recognition systems with respect to individuals with physical disabilities. Our results confirm that productivity does not differ between traditional users and those with physical disabilities. In contrast, numerous differences were observed when users rated their satisfaction with the system and when usage patterns were analyzed.

Computer usage by young individuals with down syndrome: an exploratory study

In this paper, we discuss the results of an online survey that investigates how children and young adults with Down syndrome use computers and computer-related devices. The survey responses cover 561 individuals with Down syndrome between the age of four to 21. The survey results suggest that the majority of the children and young adults with Down syndrome can use the mouse to interact with computers, which requires spatial, cognitive, and fine motor skills that were previously believed to be quite challenging for individuals with Down syndrome. The results show great difficulty in text entry using keyboards. Young individuals with Down syndrome are using a variety of computer applications and computer related devices, and computers and computer-related devices play important roles in the life of individuals with Down syndrome. There appears to be great potential in computer-related education and training to broaden existing career opportunities for individuals with Down syndrome, and there needs to be further research on this topic.

Understanding Web Credibility: A Synthesis of the Research Literature

As more of our communication, commerce, and personal data goes online, credibility becomes an increasingly important issue. How do we determine if our e-commerce sites, our healthcare sites, or our online communication partners are credible? This paper examines the research literature in the area of web credibility. This review starts by examining the cognitive foundations of credibility. Other sections of the paper examine not only the general credibility of web sites, but also online communication, such as e-mail, instant messaging, and online communities. Training and education, as well as future issues (such as CAPTCHAs and phishing), will be addressed. The implications for multiple populations (users, web developers, browser designers, and librarians) will be discussed.

Accessible privacy and security: a universally usable human-interaction proof tool

Despite growing interest in designing usable systems for managing privacy and security, recent efforts have generally failed to address the needs of users with disabilities. As security and privacy tools often rely upon subtle visual cues or other potentially inaccessible indicators, users with perceptual limitations might find such tools particularly challenging. To understand the needs of an important group of users with disabilities, a focus group was conducted with blind users to determine their perceptions of security-related challenges. Human-interaction proof (HIP) tools, commonly known as CAPTCHAs, are used by web pages to defeat robots and were identified in the focus group as a major concern. Therefore, a usability test was conducted to see how well blind users were able to use audio equivalents of these graphical tools. Finally, an accessible HIP tool was developed which combines audio and matching images, supporting both visual and audio output. Encouraging results from a small usability evaluation of the prototype with five sighted users and five blind users show that this new form of HIP is preferred by both blind and visual users to previous forms of text-based HIPs. Future directions for research are also discussed.

Designing natural language and structured entry methods for privacy policy authoring

As information technology continues to spread, we believe that there will be an increasing awareness of a fundamental need to seriously consider privacy concerns, and that doing so will require an understanding of policies that govern information use accompanied by development of technologies that can implement such policies. The research reported here describes our efforts to design a system which facilitates effective privacy policy authoring, implementation, and compliance monitoring. We employed a variety of user-centered design methods with 109 target users across the four steps of the research reported here. This case study highlights our work to iteratively design and validate a prototype with target users, and presents a laboratory evaluation aimed at providing early support for specific design decisions to meet the needs of providing flexible privacy enabling technologies. This paper highlights our work to include natural language and structured entry methods for policy authoring.