Brynn Marie Evans

Taking Leif’s advice, I have decided to write a weekly status update. I will focus on the progress I made in the following week and maybe consider work I intend to do in the coming week. I’m hoping this will help me be honest about my work, keep me on track, and keep my advisors apprised of my progress.

These last two weeks, I have been working at PARC with the intention of getting a new project started (with Ed Chi in the Augmented Social Cognition group). Generally speaking, the project will look at tagging in the enterprise. More specifically, we are interested in the information search, retrieval, and sharing practices among individuals in a workgroup with the hope of designing social tagging systems that help enterprise users with their information and sharing needs. This past week, I met with folks from a few small companies (dotherightthing, Bolt|Peters, and Get Satisfaction) and got mixed reviews on their potential to provide us with the kind of information we’re looking for. They are open to helping with our research, but the companies are relatively small (less than 10 people) and they mostly don’t use social tagging systems as part of their routine. After these meetings, we decided to pursue two different approaches for this project.

1) Distribute a critical-incident style survey, asking targeted questions about search, retrieval, and sharing behavior of individuals within workgroups. We think this could provide interesting data about current behaviors and specifically about behaviors that we are interested in. It will be challenging to compose appropriate questionnaires, but I can work on this in the coming weeks and will test it out on some pilot users to make sure the questions are specific enough. Obviously, knowing the person’s role in the company and the nature of the company will be interesting/important here so we might be able to create profiles of different styles of behavior. I will look into Survey Monkey and Mechanical Turk (and others–suggestions?) for distributing surveys and paying subjects. I will also consider recruiting participants by using the Ethnio system that Bolt|Peters has developed.

2) However, we still think that studying workgroup behaviors directly could help inform the design of a tagging system. In fact, looking at work practices of individuals as they share information across (more remote) work groups could be particularly informative. Perhaps we could observe (and/or interview) folks at Xerox, PARC, or even the Xerox group in NY. Since we don’t have contacts or a strategy for this lined up quite yet, we thought that we could initially pursue the survey and try to supplement it with data like this in the coming weeks.

Additionally, I worked with Stu Card to revise our CHI’08 paper, “Augmented Information Assimilation: Social and Algorithmic Web Aids for the Information Long Tail.” We presented the paper at the ISL Dialog; I imagine the talk will closely resemble the talk we give at CHI in April. Hopefully this will have been good, advanced preparation for that.

I have also been brainstorming my second year project and writing the final proposal. I hope to finish the proposal THIS WEEK. I’ll be discussing my project and plans in the HCI-DCOG Lab meeting on Wednesday and possibly revise my final draft after hearing other folks’ opinions/suggestions. More on this next week. I will be in San Diego through February 1 and plan to spend this time really focusing on the second year project.

Questions, comments, concerns? Let me know