May 10, 2012 @ 14:30, Room: 19AB
Chair: Amy Hurst, Carnegie Mellon, USA
Perceptions of Facebook's Value as an Information Source - Paper
Contribution & Benefit: Shows the characteristics of users who see Facebook as a source for information seeking.
Abstract » Facebook has become an increasingly important tool for people engaging in a range of communication behaviors, including requesting help from their social network to address information needs. Through a study of 614 staff members at a large university, we show how social capital, network characteristics, and use of Facebook are related to how useful individuals find Facebook to be for informational purposes and their propensity to seek different types of information on the site. We find that bridging social capital and engagement with one’s network through directed communication behaviors are important predictors of these dimensions of information seeking; furthermore, a number of demographic and usage behavior differences exist between those who choose to engage in information-seeking behaviors on Facebook and those who do not. Finally, when predicting information-seeking behaviors, we identify a significant interaction between users’ perceptions of Facebook as appropriate for purposes beyond the purely social and their engagement with their network.
ACMWebCrystal: Understanding and Reusing Examples in Web Authoring - Paper
Contribution & Benefit: Describes an example-based web design tool that automatically generates hierarchical questions and explanations about existing website styling information. Can help designers understand how to recreate desired appearances from examples.
Abstract » Examples have been widely used in the area of web design to help web authors create web pages. However, without actually understanding how an example is constructed, people often have trouble extracting the elements they want and incorporating them into their own design. This paper introduces WebCrystal, a web development tool that helps users understand how a web page is built. WebCrystal con-tributes novel interaction techniques that let the user quickly access HTML and CSS information by selecting questions regarding how a selected element is designed. It pro-vides answers using a textual description and a customized code snippet that can be copied-and-pasted to recreate the desired properties. WebCrystal also supports combining the styles and structures from multiple elements into the generated code snippet, and provides visualizations on the web page itself to explain layout relationships. Our user study shows that WebCrystal helped both novice and experienced developers complete more tasks successfully using significantly less time.
ACMUnderstanding Mobile Q&A Usage: An Exploratory Study - Paper
Contribution & Benefit: This work provides the first large-scale analysis of mobile Q&A usage which is very different from traditional Q&A system usage, and identifies the key factors of mobile Q&A usage.
Abstract » Recently questioning and answering (Q&A) communities that facilitate knowledge sharing among people have been introduced to the mobile environments such as Naver Mobile Q&A and ChaCha. These mobile Q&A services are very different from traditional Q&A sites in that questions/answers are short in length and are exchanged via mobile devices (e.g., SMS or mobile Internet). While traditional Q&A sites have been well investigated, so far little is known about the mobile Q&A usage. To understand mobile Q&A usage, we analyzed 2.4 million question/answer pairs spanning a 14 month period from Naver Mobile Q&A and performed a complementary survey study of 555 active mobile Q&A users. We find that mobile Q&A is deeply wired into users' everyday life activities--its usage is largely dependent on users' spatial, temporal, and social contexts; the key factors of mobile Q&A usage are accessibility/convenience of mobile Q&A, promptness of receiving answers, and users' satisficing behavior of information seeking (i.e., minimizing efforts and settling with good enough information). We also observe that users tend to seek more factual information attributed to everyday life activities than they do on traditional Q&A sites and that they exhibit unique interaction patterns such as repeating and refining questions as coping strategies in seeking information needs. Our main findings reported in the paper have significant implications on the design of mobile Q&A systems.
ACMUsing Physical-Social Interactions to Support Information Re-finding - Long Case Study
Contribution & Benefit: This case study presents a system that tracks when information is used during physical-social interactions and automatically tags information with people and groups of people (i.e., social orbits).
Abstract » A dominant way in which we organize our world is through social interactions. Much research has made use of social context as a way to support information storage and re-finding. However, they tend to focus only on the virtual side of sociality, and downplay the role of physicality in social interaction. In our research, we investigate how a person's physical-social interactions, in the form of co-presence, can be employed to support digital information management. We designed and implemented a system based on this concept and evaluated it in three two-month long case studies. Our system associates digital information used in social situations with co-present individuals through the use of automatic or manual tagging. Our findings showed that although the three participants varied greatly in their information filing and information use strategies, they all accessed digital information using people or groups of people, thereby supporting our initial premise. However, we found that the need to use digital information during social interactions arises only when there is a shared focus in the form of, for example, a large display, or when there is a social purpose for the information, for instance to share it with other meeting members at a later time. Our observations suggest the need for further research and innovation in technology affordances for real-time information use in physical-social interactions.