Tag Archives: research

How many users for social design problems?

24 Apr 2010 – 20:01

I’ve been thinking a lot about research methods for social design problems. For example, how do you research what goes on on Facebook? How does Facebook do this currently? I believe they use metrics from their data team — which I do not believe really uncover social interaction design issues. How do you research how the unemployed [...]

By brynn | Posted in research, sxd | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

On why people ask questions on social networks

24 Apr 2010 – 19:05

Social search behavior is now generally agreed to be common enough that companies like Google are buying up companies like Aardvark, and academic researchers are asking good questions about the value of networks for question-answering (Q-A). I have done a bit of research in this area myself, and so I was quite pleased to read [...]

By brynn | Posted in research, social search, sxd | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

When is a questionnaire just a survey?

26 Aug 2009 – 22:17

I asked a question on twitter today: Do you consider “surveys” to be different from “questionnaires”? If so, how? This question struck me as I was editing a paper where I was describing a survey (or is it a questionnaire?) that we used to collect data from Mechanical Turk. I was about to use the [...]

By brynn | Posted in research | Also tagged , , | Comments (4)

User Needs during Social Search

15 Oct 2008 – 14:38

(This was also posted on the ASC blog.) There has been a lot of buzz around social search in the online tech community, but I am largely disappointed by the new tools and services I’ve encountered. It’s not that these sites are unusable, but that they each seem to take on a different conception of [...]

By brynn | Posted in research, social, social search | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)