Joseph Konstan on Human-Computer Interaction
UBIQUITY: How does your work fit you into the general field of human/computer interaction?
KONSTAN: My work as a researcher spans several different parts of human/computer interaction. The biggest project I have been working on, and one that I have been working on now for nine years, is the GroupLens project which is about recommender systems-systems that do real-time personalization. It is very much like you see on Amazon.com when you are recommended books or movies that they think you might like. I joined that project a decade ago, and it had already been going for a couple of years. We've been exploring both the technology for how you create those recommendations and, what I think is more important, the understanding of what designs and what properties lead users to find them useful. So a chunk of this work is understanding, given what a computer can do, what is better to present to a person to be helpful to them. I will give you one concrete example of that. We have, and this is work that dates back to '99 or so, studied explaining to users what the system was doing as a way of helping them understand whether they should trust the computer systems' recommendations and we found that most of the explanations that were intuitively appealing to a computer scientist, things that got into the statistics and the processing, completely turned off ordinary people. At the same time, really simple three point charts or analogies were much more compelling to the average user. Knowing this has been helpful. In recent years that work has also moved much more into understanding the whole idea of online communities and how people participate in them, and what's most interesting in my perspective, how you can design a community to elicit a level of participation. What do you set up in the design of a website, whether it's for conversation or in our case, for getting people to rate movies or rate other content, what do you do in that design to get people to contribute? Do you tell them about what other people are doing? Do you help them measure themselves against their peers? Do you show them how much other people are benefiting from their work, or how much they've benefited from the work of others? I think these are interesting questions that hit at the overlap between computer science and psychology, sociology, economics, other social sciences. (Via Ubiquity)
KONSTAN: My work as a researcher spans several different parts of human/computer interaction. The biggest project I have been working on, and one that I have been working on now for nine years, is the GroupLens project which is about recommender systems-systems that do real-time personalization. It is very much like you see on Amazon.com when you are recommended books or movies that they think you might like. I joined that project a decade ago, and it had already been going for a couple of years. We've been exploring both the technology for how you create those recommendations and, what I think is more important, the understanding of what designs and what properties lead users to find them useful. So a chunk of this work is understanding, given what a computer can do, what is better to present to a person to be helpful to them. I will give you one concrete example of that. We have, and this is work that dates back to '99 or so, studied explaining to users what the system was doing as a way of helping them understand whether they should trust the computer systems' recommendations and we found that most of the explanations that were intuitively appealing to a computer scientist, things that got into the statistics and the processing, completely turned off ordinary people. At the same time, really simple three point charts or analogies were much more compelling to the average user. Knowing this has been helpful. In recent years that work has also moved much more into understanding the whole idea of online communities and how people participate in them, and what's most interesting in my perspective, how you can design a community to elicit a level of participation. What do you set up in the design of a website, whether it's for conversation or in our case, for getting people to rate movies or rate other content, what do you do in that design to get people to contribute? Do you tell them about what other people are doing? Do you help them measure themselves against their peers? Do you show them how much other people are benefiting from their work, or how much they've benefited from the work of others? I think these are interesting questions that hit at the overlap between computer science and psychology, sociology, economics, other social sciences. (Via Ubiquity)
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