The growing number of interactive visualizations on the web has made it possible for the general public to access data and insights that were once only available to domain experts. At the same time, this rise has yielded new challenges for visualization creators, who must now understand and engage a growing and diverse audience. To bridge this gap between creators and audiences, we explore and evaluate components of a design-feedback loop that would enable visualization creators to better accommodate their audiences as they explore the visualizations. In this dissertation, we approach this goal by quantifying, modeling and creating tools that manage people’s open-ended explorations of visualizations on the web. In particular, we: 1. Quantify the effects of design alternatives on people’s interaction patterns in visualizations. We define and evaluate two techniques: HindSight (encoding a user’s interaction history) and text-based search, where controlled experiments suggest that design details can significantly modulate the interaction patterns we observe from participants using a given visualization. 2. Develop new metrics that characterize facets of people’s exploration processes. Specifically, we derive expressive metrics describing interaction patterns such as exploration uniqueness, and use Bayesian inference to model distributional effects on interaction behavior. Our results show that these metrics capture novel patterns in people’s interactions with visualizations. 3. Create tools that manage and analyze an audience’s interaction data for a given visualization. We develop a prototype tool, ReVisIt, that visualizes an audience’s interactions with a given visualization. Through an interview study with visualization creators, we found that ReVisIt make creators aware of individual and overall trends in their audiences’ interaction patterns. By establishing some of the core elements of a design-feedback loop for visualization creators, the results in this research may have a tangible impact on the future of publishing interactive visualizations on the web. Equipped with techniques, metrics, and tools that realize an initial feedback loop, creators are better able to understand the behavior and user needs, and thus create visualizations that make data and insights more accessible to the diverse audiences on the web.

Designing GSS that can be used effectively by co-located groups presents a number of specific problems that do not exist with other group configurations. In particular, any GSS in a co-located setting has an overhead of use that must be recouped by its benefits, or it reduces the overall group effectiveness. In distributed groups the same basic payback is necessary, but usually the GSS is also used as a communication medium; in co-located groups, members communicate directly so this immediate payback is not available to them and the benefit must come from the decision support strand of GSS.

With the rapid advancement of affective agents, there is an increasing interest in enhancing agent's emotional communication and maximizing social response from users. This thesis investigates the influence of gender-emotion stereotypes on the communicating of emotional events by affective agents. One hundred and twenty-eight undergraduates with equal number of males and females, successfully participated in a 2 (affective agent's gender: male vs. female) x 2 (participant's gender: male and female) between-subjects experiment with twenty emotional events conveying four gender-stereotypic emotions presented by affective agents as within-subject factors. Significant main effects demonstrated that participants perceived affective agents to be exhibiting greater emotional intensity in stereotypic emotional events that were gender-consistent compared to those that were gender-inconsistent. On the other hand, participants experienced a higher level of message involvement and perceived affective agents to be exhibiting greater social presence and trustworthiness in stereotypic emotional events that were gender- inconsistent compared to those that were gender-consistent. In addition, female participants were found to possess greater sensitivity in the perception of emotional intensity and social pre sence than male participants in all stereotypic emotional events communicated by affective agents. The findings of the thesis suggest that appropriate matching of affective agent's gender with the stereotypic emotional events that it is communicating is critical in enhancing human-agent communication.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2006. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 244-252).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xi, 170 p.; also includes graphics. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: Brenda Dervin, Communication Graduate Program. Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-144).

published_or_final_version / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

Games are fundamentally a social activity. The effects of this foundation can be felt at every level - from the social negotiation of rules, through cooperation and collaboration between players during the game, to the effects of relationships and social status on play. Social effects can change the way the game is played, but the mechanics of games can also affect the patterns of social behaviours of the players. The arrangement of game mechanics and interfaces together defines a ``social architecture". This architecture is not limited to directly social mechanics such as trading and messaging - the game design itself has a holistic effect on social activity. This dissertation frames games around these social aspects, and focuses on analysis of the patterns that emerge from these playful interactions. Firstly, a model is defined to understand games based on the social effects of play, and these effects explored based on the varying impact they have on the play experience. Mischief and deviance is also investigated as forces that challenge these social effects in and around games. Based on interaction data gathered from server logs of experimental social games, social network analysis is used as a tool to uncover the macroscopic social architectures formed by each design. This allows the use of quantitative methods to understand the nature of the relationship between game design and the social patterns that emerge around games in play. Key findings confirm that social activity follows a heavy-tailed distribution - a small number of ``hardcore" players are responsible for a disproportionately large number of interactions in the community of the game. Further than this, the connections between active hardcore and the rest of the player base show that without the hardcore users, the community of games as ``small worlds" would collapse, with large numbers of players being separated from the society within a game. The emergence of grouping behaviour is investigated based on the effect of social feedback. Following findings of social psychology in non-game environments, evidence is provided that highlights the effect of socio-contextual feedback on players forming strongly bound tribal groups within games. The communities formed through the play of games can be described in terms of network graphs - webs of interactions flowing around a network of players. Social network analyses of social games show the emergence of patterns of reciprocity, clustering and tribal behaviours among the players. The evidence also shows that the collections of game mechanics, or social architectures, of games have a predictable effect on the wider social patterns of the players. As such, this suggests games can be specifically engineered for social effects based on changes in the patterns of interactions, and issues around mechanical or interface elements can be identified based on anomalies observed in the network graph of player interactions. Together, this dissertation provides a link between the theoretical ideas around social play to the measurable effects of social behaviours of players within games. It proves that game designs, as mechanical systems, have a demonstrable effect on the social patterns of play, and that these patterns can be examined and used to engineer better game designs for the benefit of social experience.

This item is an invited response to Bader and Nyce (1998) Theory and Practice in the Development Community: Is there room for cultural analysis? It is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. (1998) Cultural Analysis And What Designers Need To Know - A Case of Sometimes Too Much, Sometimes Too Little, and Always Too Late. ACM Journal of Computer Documentation, 22,1, 13-17. Bader and Nyce's article raises intriguing issues that have concerned researchers in HCI and user-centered systems design for much of the last decade: to what extent can a deep social science methodology influence the process of technology design usefully. Their conclusion, that cultural analysis yields knowledge perceived to be of little value by system designers, is in my view, largely correct. However, while I share their conclusion, I do not accept their rationale. In the present paper I will attempt to demonstrate that the root of the problem lies less with the system designers than the inappropriate application of the specific social science methods Bader and Nyce invoke, which itself can be traced to their overly narrow view of the design process and their assumption that cultural analysis is the most useful social scientific method. It appears to me that Bader and Nyce's analysis rests firmly on one key point: developers make epistemological errors. These errors thus systematically bias designers' output and hence color their designs. The authors describe two such error types. The first is that classic problem of designers assuming that users are somewhat like them, and hence the designers' judgments of what constitutes good design will logically be shared by the intended users. The second type of error reflects the designers' views of social life being describable in terms of rules, albeit complex rules, which enable interaction to be predicted. This key point of epistemology needs to be examined critically since much of what follows in the Bader and Nyce article, and my response, flows from it.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. (2003) User Interface Design. MacMillan Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Vol. 4, London:MacMillan, 453-458. Article definition: This article covers the basic issues that the field of cognitive science raises in the design and testing of new digital technologies for human use. Contents list: Introduction, Cognitive Science and design, The Basics of Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Design Guidelines: from psychophysics to semiotics, Beyond guidelines Cognitive theories and models in HCI, Developing user-centered design methods, Summary, Bibliography, Glossary

Annotated bibliography on information visualization for digital librarians. Focuses on overviews of information visualization, key technologies, primary sources, visualization techniques with a digital library application, and materials that are understandable without an engineering background. Some Web-based sources offer demonstration software.