Social Perspectives on HCII: aka social mini

Course Overview Goals – Broad introduction to social perspectives on HCI & Information Systems CSCW, Small groups, IT & Organization, Online communities – Reading intensive 42 articles ~ 1000 pages – History of the field(s) Classic articles Important perspectives Sampling of important topics Less emphasis on cutting edge research

Orientation Syllabus & topics Course requirements – 6 readings/week – Lead class session – Lit review – Wikipedia improvement – Final exam Discussion abt class structure – More integrative discussion of papers – 2 student/presenters pre class session

Media Richness: Key Take-aways Technology isn’t just hardware & bits Concept of ‘fit’ between technological attributes and X (e.g., communication) needs What makes good theory Along the way: – Understanding & evaluating media richness theory – Understanding & evaluating Clark’s collaborative language model

Media Richness 40 year research tradition on the value of communication modalities on communication success. E.g., – Human Factors tradition: Short, J., Williams, E., & Christie, B. (1976). The social psychology of telecommunications. New York: Wiley. Chapanis, A. (1975). Interactive human communication. Scientific American, 232, – Organizational behavior tradition: Van de Ven, A., Delbecq, A., & Koenig, R. (1976). Determinants of coordination modes within organizations. American Sociological Review, 41, Katz, R., & Tushman, M. (1979). Communication patterns, project performance, and task characteristics: An empirical evaluation and integration in an R&D setting. Organizational behavior and human performance, 23(2), Daft, R., & Lengel, R. (1986). Organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design. Management Science, 32(5),

Cisco Telepresence Application Will this technology improve distributed work?

Multiple 2-person referential communication tasks E.g., Find nearest MD on map E.g., Build trash cart Common results: Voice speeds solutions compared to typing Faster times More turns More words Visual channel doesn't help (in a talking head set-up) (fm Chapanis, 1972) Referential Communication Results

Why doesn’t “talking-heads" video improve referential communication? Most of the content is in the words Gestures may be pre-verbal, rather than illustration For emotion, video and audio channel can be redundant Rich media may be useful for handling ambiguous and conflictful topics E.g., Images change lie-detection, but help liar over the lie-detector Seeing your partner doesn't improve ability to communicate about objects in the world:

Human Factors Tradition Main effect predictions: – Humans evolved with Face-to-Face communication – Deviations from Face-to-Face lead to worse communication performance

Fit Organizational information processing requirements from goals, environment, technology and size. Organizational effectiveness Information processing capacity of structural design choices (vertical & horizontal linkages, departmental groupings, types of communication) Fit btw Technology & Need

Fit (Tushman)

Tushman: Fit between task and peer-to- peer communication Departments are more successful when their style of communication matches their task & interdependence

Uncertainty vs Equivocality What’s the difference? Will same type of technology for coordination aid them both?

Uncertainty vs Equivocality Uncertainty=Information deficit between information is needed to perform tasks and information that is available –Based on features of the task –On information in hand Equivocality=Ambiguity or existence of multiple & conflicting interpretations of an organizational situation

Media Richness Theory in a Nutshell: Fit btw structure & needs

Is this a good theory? Criteria?

How do you evaluate media richness theory? Conceptually: – Is the uncertainty/equivocality distinction valid? – Is the concept of richness well specified? – Is the theory connecting equivocality and media well defined? E.g., What is the mechanism? Empirically: Do predictions about choice and effectiveness hold?

One Test Lab experiment varying equivocality & media richness – Equivocality: High equivocality : Undergrad admissions problem, with arguments about weighting SATs, GPA, extra curricular activities, jobs, residency, etc. Low equivocality: SAT problem solving questions – Richness: Immediate feedback: Full duplex vs. half-duplex audio/video Chat vs. Multiplicity of cues: Full duplex audio/video vs. chat Half-duplex audio/video vs. – Outcomes: Time, Consensus, Decision quality, Satisfaction Dennis, A. R., & Kinney, S. T. (1998). Testing media richness theory in the new media: The effects of cues, feedback, and task equivocality. Information Systems Research, 9(3),

Results Faster with – Multiple cues – Interactivity Contingency effects – No effects on decision quality – No effects on consensus – No effects on communication satisfaction – Interaction between multiplicity of cues & equivocality on completion time, but inconsistent with theory Multiple cues improves performance most for SAT task, not admissions task Media richness X Task equivocality

Clark’s Theory of Cooperative Language Use to Explain Media Effects

Clark’s Theory of Common Ground Interpersonal communication is more efficient when people share greater common ground Mutual knowledge, beliefs, goals, attitudes that people know that they share Grounding = The interactive process by which communicators exchange evidence about what they do or do not understand over the course of a conversation, as they accrue common ground. – Presentation phase: Speaker presents utterance to addressee – Acceptance phase: Addressee accepts utterance by providing evidence of understanding People ground utterances to extent necessary “for current purposes” Principle of least collaborative effort - provide the minimum necessary for successful grounding Grounding in a Bicycle Repair Task A: Next you have to put the clamp on. B: The clamp? A: Yeah, see those pieces over there? B: Yeah. A: It’s the long one. B: Ok I got it.

Mutual Knowledge or Common Ground Communication rests on mutual knowledge or common ground: – The knowledge the parties to a communication hold in common and know they have in common Speakers as hypothesis testers. – “If I say ‘X’, will listener understand ‘X’?” – “If I say ‘Did you see the game?’ will listener understand ‘Did you see Sunday’s AFC Championship football game?’” Speaker does hypothesis testing at two points: – Presentation phase — “What should I say?” – Acceptance phase — “Did the listener understand what I meant or should I elaborate?”

Name these objects A B 100%: Circle 70%: Star 30%: Adjective Star

Name these objects A BC 80%: Circle 20%: White Circle 60%: Star 40%: Adjective Star 0%: Star 100%: Adjective Star Speakers take into account what they expect their partners to know – Name objects to distinguish among similar objects which a listener (a) has in mind and (b) is likely to confuse

Referential communication task One person (the director) tells another (the worker) in what order to place these Tangram figures Observer notes what the team does to improve over time – How did the pair coordinate naming conventions? – How did the director know if the worker understood a direction? Up to four trials, with four figures per trial

Communicators come to agree on a pair-specific description of objects With a new partner, words per object returns to close to original level Partners are learning

What evidence do people use for grounding? Personal knowledge Group membership Linguistic co-presence Explicit feedback Physical co-presence

Stimuli for Expert vs. Novice Study

Task: Order postcards of NYC landmarks Experts: New Yorkers Novices: Mid-westerns & others Experts talking to experts are more efficient than novices talking to novices Work with resources at hand Mixed pairs learn from each other Novices learn to use names Experts learn to use descriptions But adjustments are incomplete Partners can partially accommodate to differences in others knowledge

Role of technology

Applying Grounding Theory To Technology Clark & Brennan (1991): “People should ground with those techniques available in a medium that lead to the least collaborative effort.” Hypothesis: Objective characteristics of different communication media change the costs of conversational grounding and strategies for doing so. Some key types of costs: – Production/Reception costs: costs of producing/receiving messages – Start-up costs: costs of initiating conversation – Asynchrony costs: costs of timing utterances – Speaker change costs: costs of turn-taking – Repair costs: costs of correcting misunderstandings Should allow us to predict in advance what features new technologies should have to meet different collaborative purposes

Affordances of Communication Media (Clark & Brennan, 1991) Co-Presence Participants share physical environment, including a view of what each other is doing and looking at Visibility Participants can see one another but not what each is doing or looking at AudibilityParticipants can hear one another Cotemporality Messages are received close to the time that they are produced, permitting fine-grained interactivity Simultaneity Multiple participants can send/receive messages at the same time, allowing backchannel communication Sequentiality Participants take turns in an orderly fashion in a single conversation ReviewabilityMessages do not fade over time RevisabilityMessages can be revised before being sent

Affordances of Conventional Media Affordance Face-to- Face Video Conf. Phone Copresence ++ ? -- Visibility Audibility Cotemporality Simultaneity Sequentiality Reviewability Revisability -- ++

Exactly how conversationalist achieve common ground depends up the details of the technology available formulation production reception understanding start-up delay asynchrony speaker change display fault repair co-presence visibility audibility co-temporality (no lag) simultaneity (full duplex) sequentiality reviewability revisability Features of communication setting Needs for & costs of Change Technology changes strategies and costs of grounding

Exploring the Role of Shared Visual Information What features of physical space influence its value? – Fidelity of views – Hypotheses: Delay, rotation & host of other factors that make views dissimilar will degrade collaborative performance When is shared visual context most important? – Visual complexity – Hypothesis: When task is complex enough that language itself is insufficient to efficiently describe events

Cooperative Jigsaw Puzzle Task Helper has picture of target and gives instructions to worker, who moves pieces to match target Subjects communicate via audio & shared computer screens Target Shared view Work areaStaging area

Manipulations Task complexity Visual fidelity – None: Audio only – Partial Shared screen with a 3-second delay Shared screen with rotation – Immediate: Shared screens with no delay & no rotation – Field of view: From identical to none SimpleComplex Primary colorsTartan plaids Static colorsChanging colors Pieces abuttedPieces overlapped

Experimental Manipulations Fidelity of the Visual Space Immediate Delayed (3 seconds) None Other studies – Rotation of the spatial perspectives – Discontinuous, “push to see” images Visual difficulty: Static vs. Dynamic Tasks Other studies – Spatially easy vs. difficult puzzles – Easy versus difficult to name objects – Same vs. different visual perspective Immediate condition No SVS condition

Summary of Multiple Experiments Task performance – Shared visual space improved task performance (speed & accuracy) in all experiments – Improved performance most for visually complex tasks Shifted conversational strategies – Shared visual space improved improved efficiency of reference (e.g., words/reference) – Lack of shared visual space forced many workarounds

Two Distinct Coordination Processes for Joint Action Situational awareness: – In a changing environment, parties need to understand current state of task vis-à-vis goals in order to plan next action Conversational grounding: – When using language to coordinate action, pair needs to understand what a communication partner understands now to assess success of last utterance & to plan new ones Is this distinction theoretically important? Do the data support the distinction?

Visual Feedback Most Helpful with Linguistically Complex Tasks

Grounding vs Situational Awareness Difficulty grounding Difficulty SA Easy SA Easy grounding

Influence of Visual Alignment on Deistic Reference & Task Alignment Spatial references Task references

Influence of Field of View on Deistic Reference & Task Alignment Spatial references Task references