Social Visualization Encouraging Participation in Online Communities

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Social Visualization Encouraging Participation in
Online Communities

• Lingling Sun
• Julita Vassileva
• University of Saskatchewan
• Canada

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Outline

• Goal
• Background Motivating Participation
• Related Theories in Social Psychology
• Related Works in Online Communities
• Design of the Visualization
• Static Design
• Usability study
• Dynamic Design
• Experiment and Evaluation
• Final Design
• Experiment and Evaluation

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Goal

• Problem encouraging participation in P2P online
  communities. 80/20 rule.
• Existing solutions focus on technical hacks,
  optimizing protocols, etc.
• Goal motivate users to bring more contributions
• Target Peer-to-Peer (P2P) online community
• Method apply community visualization a
  graphical user interface which can visually
  represent a P2P online community

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Theories in Social Psychology

• Social Comparison
• People tend to compare with their peer group
  their ideas, believes, behaviors, attitudes etc.
• People want to fit in their peer group
• e.g. Have similar idea as their peers
• e.g. Do similar things as their peers do

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Theories (2)

• Balance Theory

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Related Work in Online Communities
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Visualization Static Design
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Evaluation Static Design

• Comtella for sharing research papers among profs
  and grad- students
• Deployed in our Department, 2 months, 20 users,
  fall 2003
• Not enough data for quantitative evaluation
• Hard to ensure simultaneous presence too complex
  topics hierarchy
• User Feedback
• Visualization is a nice feature
• Useful easy to discover who has
  whatinteresting
• Major Problems
• Not enough interactivity
• Random graphical location
• No consistent node representation, size depends
  on who is active at the moment
• No strong motivation effect, sometimes even
  discouraging
• Not self-explanatory

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Visualization Dynamic Design
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Experiment

• Comtella supporting a class of students to share
  class-related resources
• Subjects 35 students taking CMPT 490 in T2
  2003/2004
• Servants reside on a server
• ? participation focus is on sharing URLs of
  articles
• Duration January 11 April 5, 2004
• Comtella without visualization 6 topics
• Comtella with visualization 4 topics
• 1 topic gt 1 week, except topic 6 gt 3 weeks

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Evaluation

• Collected data about
• Visualization usage
• User cooperative actions sharing, downloading
  from others, ratings, comments, logging in
• User feedback questionnaire
• Correlating data about usage of visualization and
  cooperative actions
• Comparing the performances of the group of
  subjects under two conditions
• with the visualization (first 6 topics of class)
• without the visualization (remaining 4 topics)

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Evaluation
  Total Contribution Total Contribution Original Contribution Original Contribution Comments Comments Ratings Ratings
  number number number number
Overall 3526 100 821 100 888 100 578 100
before 7 803 22.77 331 40.32 176 19.82 73 12.63
week 7 745 21.13 131 15.96 162 18.24 112 19.38
after 7 2723 77.23 490 59.68 712 80.18 505 87.37
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Evaluation

• People who used the visualization more often
  contributed more
• e.g. the top ten users made over 50 of their
  contributions after the visualization was
  introduced.
• The visualization had a greater effect on the
  total number of contributions (shared papers)
  than on the original (new) contributions
• People used more often the default view (the view
  showing the original contribution of each user).
• Very few users made the effort to make an extra
  selection to see other views
• Some users contributed many links of low quality

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Lessons Learned from Dynamic Design Evaluation

• Multi-views are not useful because users do not
  want to make extra selections -gt need to
  eliminate user effort
• integrate as much info as possible in one view
• only ask user to select the topic (week)
• Visualization should be intuitive and
  self-explanatory
• A better clustering approach needed ? Classify
  users into different contribution levels based on
  the natural gaps in their contributions rather
  than on fixed thresholds
• Stars need to be more attractive
• Need to motivate social comparison in the quality
  of the contributions ? find a way to visualize
  user reputation

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Visualization Final Design
Size number of original
contributions Colour membership
(status) Brightness reputation (quality of
contributions) State
offline or online
More attractive design of the stars Stars vary in
size, colour, brightness, state
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Visualization Final Design
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Experiment

• Comtella used as class-support tool again
• Web-based application (ensures presence, more
  reliable)
• Subjects 30 students taking CMPT 408 in T2
  2004/2005, January 17 April 8, 2005
• Cooperative acts sharing URLs of new articles,
  reading articles shared by others, rating,
  logging-in
• Experiment design
• two groups with randomly assigned users
• Group A (less active), Group B (more active)

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Experiment

• Hypothesis

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Evaluation
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Evaluation
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Evaluation

• The hypothesis is confirmed by the results
• The inactive group becomes more active when it
  had access to the visualization, while the other
  group remains the same
• ? The difference between the performance of the
  two groups shrinks
• The inactive group becomes less active when it
  did not have access to the visualization, and the
  active group becomes more active when it had the
  visualization ?
• The difference between the performance of the two
  groups increases
• Statistical tests (t-Distribution Test and
  Wilcoxons Matched Pairs Signed Rank Test) show
  that the difference between the performances of
  the two groups is significant for all
  activities, i.e. it is not due to chance or
  randomness -gt it is a result of applying the
  visualization.
• Statistical significance for logging in (0.95 for
  both t-test and Wilcoxon) and rating (0.975 for
  t-test and 0.95 for Wilcoxon) activities
• No statistical significance for sharing and
  reading activities.

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User Feedback

• 65 of the users said they used the visualization
  mainly to compare contributions
• 40 used the visualization to find top
  contributors

  -2 -1 0 1 2
overall 9.09 0 22.73 59.09 9.09
support tool to cmpt408 8.70 4.35 13.04 34.78 39.13
usability 10.53 21.05 21.05 42.11 5.26
reliability 9.52 19.05 14.29 42.86 14.29
visualization attractive 10 5 35 30 20
visualization useful 10 5 35 40 10
visualization intuitive 10 15 35 25 15
visualization effective 25 15 40 20 0
quality of shared links 20 0 25 45 10
fairness 10 0 10 65 15
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Conclusions

• The prototype community visualization has
  motivational effect on user participation i.e.
  stimulates users to contribute more ratings and
  be more active in the online community.
• Usefulness, Visual attractiveness
• User controls (interaction) vs. simplicity,
  intuitive design
• Personal preferences
• Future work
• Exploring and comparing the effect of other forms
  and metaphors of presenting community information
  (e.g. charts, tables, different metaphors)
• Experimenting with one feature at a time
• Representing relationships between users, e.g.
  who reads whose contributions most often.

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More information
Try Comtella at http//kardam.usask.ca8080/comt
ellaum/ Read more about motivating
participation http//bistrica.usask.ca/madmuc/in
dex.html
Questions ?
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Visualization Dynamic Design

• Topic selection
• Criteria selection
• Total contribution
• Original contribution
• Status
• Usage frequency
• Viewing details of a peer
• Hierarchical location of nodes
• X 10 N level one
• Y 40 (N - X) 36N level two,
• Z 50 (N - X - Y) 27N level three,
• The rest 27N level four