Building virtual communities: opportunities and challenges

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Building virtual communities opportunities and
challenges

• Gitte Lindgaard
• Human Oriented Technology Lab (HOTLab)
• Carleton University
• Ottawa, K1S 5B6

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What are virtual communities?

• A virtual, or online community is an informal
  group whose members are connected by means of
  information technologies, typically the Internet
• Communities form around a special interest
• There is not necessarily a strong bond among the
  members
• Membership is very fluid
• The Web 2.0 concept emphasizes social interaction
  and exchange between users online

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Virtual community characteristics

• Early communities
• Text-based
• asynchronous (e.g. bulletin boards)
• synchronous (e.g. chat rooms, instant messaging)
• Current communities
• Role playing games
• Other interactive games (e.g. gambling)
• Multimedia and multimodal
• They often start from a portal

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_at_! RRRRRrrrr!!!
Friendly online specialist
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Given the different audiences you serve and
their varying levels of tech experience
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how might you select suitable technologies?

• Multimedia
• Applications involve computer-assisted
  interactive presentations in more than one
  sensory modality. Media presentations in which
  the user has a purely passive role like in film,
  TV or recorded music, do not qualify as
  multimedia regardless of how many different media
  are involved. (Waterworth Chignell, 1997)
• Multimodal
• Applications involve computer input and output in
  more than one sensory modality, for example sound
  and text, haptic and graphic output, haptic and
  spoken input

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Demands on the user Sensory carry-over effects

• The olfactory system
• smell and memory
• preference ratings
• performance
• The visual system
• first impression
• visual imagery for pain management (Apkarian
  Ayrapetian, 1997)
• color as a primer for preferences and performance
• The auditory system

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Our results suggest

• Users
• form an opinion of a web site very quickly
• are not fooled by poor usability, but
• that does not influence their opinion of
  aesthetics
• this contradicts Tractinsky et al.s (2000)
  results claiming that if it is pretty, it is
  usable
• Once users have formed an opinion, they stick
  with it
• This suggests that the first impression is very
  important
• But how far can we trust our eyes?

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Which circle in the middle is bigger?
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Is this possible!?!
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If you take a look at the following  picture ,
let me tell you ... it is not animated.  Your
eyes are making it move.  To test this, stare at
one spot for a couple seconds and everything will
stop moving.  Or look at the black center of each
circle and it will stop moving.  But move your
eyes to the next black center and the previous
will move after you take your eyes away from
it....  Weird 
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So .

• We dont necessarily see what is there
• Our brains usually correct for impossible images
• We know in an instant if we like or dislike what
  we see.
• Next research question how long is an instant?
• Mere exposure effect in lt 5msec
• Effect increases with increasing number of
  exposures, but awareness does not .
• Starts to wane at 50msec

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Experiment 500msec exposure time

• Participants (N 22)
• 100 home pages (good? bad) shown twice in
  different random orders
• 20 practice pages shown first
• 500msec exposure time
• Subject rated visual appeal (interval scale)
• Selected top 25 and bottom 25 for further
  investigation

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Results First versus second trial
R2 .94, plt.001
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Next experiment

• Selected 25 best and 25 worst home pages
• N 31 500 msec exposure time
• Same method as before for first two trials
• Added trial 3
• Unlimited exposure time
• Subjects asked to rate
• Simple ? complex
• Interesting ? boring
• Good design ? bad design
• Clear ? confusing
• Good color ? bad color
• Good layout ? bad layout
• Imaginative ? unimaginative

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Results First versus second trial
R2 .97, plt.001
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Results Study 1 versus study 2
R2 .95, plt.001
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What these results tell us

• People decide how much they like a web site very
  quickly
• The first impression is a holistic, visceral
  (physiological) response
• Once they have decided, they stick with their
  decision
• Recent research shows that around 70 of web
  users are bouncers, i.e. they only look at 2-3
  items/pages before moving onto the next site
• Criterion1 portal must not offend people
  visually

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Human information processing

• We are quickly overwhelmed by too much
  information, so
• Criterion 2 ensure that only relevant
  information is shown
• Know where people will look first
• Reading from upper left corner, scanning along
  the horizontal plane, ending in lower right
  corner
• Scanning columns from upper left, going down the
  page, then next column to the right, and ending
  in lower right corner
• Screen hot spots

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Proximity associated to windows

• 12 10.618 11
  11.618 21

33 45 66
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33 66
50
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Human information processing

• We are quickly overwhelmed by too much
  information, so
• Criterion 2 ensure that only relevant
  information is shown
• Know where people will look first
• Reading from upper left corner, scanning along
  the horizontal plane, ending in lower right
  corner
• Scanning columns from upper left, going down the
  page, then next column to the right, and ending
  in lower right corner
• Screen hot spots
• Criterion 3 place most important information
  where it will be detected first

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Demands on the user Sensory carry-over effects

• The olfactory system
• The visual system
• The auditory system
• sound can enhance experience
• sound can supplement sensory processing
• Sound is excellent for collaborating with
  others.
• but sound can also interfere, confuse, distort

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The auditory system

• Sound can enhance experience
• Soft background music in hotels
• Improves learning, probably because learner is in
  flow
• sound can supplement sensory processing
• In eyes busy environment (OR, in-vehicle,
  control rooms)
• but sound can also interfere
• Misalignment between sound and text

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PowerPoint slides
The world according to Brahms 10/13/2005 Modeling
and Simulating work Practice
NAME GAVAN LINTERN
AUDIO ONLY
Latency 1.22sec Up 0 bit/s Down 38.1 kbit/s
Speakers frame 17 Your frame num 17
Room
Kathryn Oakley Joe Zimmermann Alex
Havloujian Peter Smorhul Penelope Sanderson Ivan
Pleschner
CHAT
Andy Jones We can see you, but we have no
sound. Gavan Lintern Ok, we ll try to turn up
the volume. Andy Jones Hello guys. We cant hear
you. Gavan Lintern Is that better? Andy Jones
Gavan, can you do something about the sound? We
cant hear you
Send
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Not-so-good news Collaborative efforts

• Cant hear you
• Is Anton there?
• Are we on the right slide?
• Is talking heads and PowerPoint slides really
  interaction?
• Inability to share documents in real-time
• Problems of editing documents as a dispersed
  group
• Criterion 4 use sound sparingly and only if you
  can ensure privacy for clients who are listening
  as well as for those who are not listening

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Summary of criteria

• Criterion1 portal must not offend people
  visually
• Criterion 2 ensure that only relevant
  information is shown
• Criterion 3 place most important information
  where it will be detected first
• Criterion 4 use sound sparingly and only if you
  can ensure privacy for clients who are listening
  as well as for those who are not listening

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Design for different learners (Lawless Brown,
1997)

• Knowledge seekers
• pursue information relevant to the context of the
  learning environment
• Select strategic, systematic navigation path
  taking them logically to screens with info
  leading them to better comprehension of material
• Create self-explanations
• Actively integrate existing and new material
• Test incoming material to verify their
  understanding
• most stimulated by incomplete information
  inviting discovery and further inquiry
• Feature explorers
• Spend disproportionate amount of time interacting
  with bells whistles
• i.e. attend to interface features rather than
  content
• Multimedia apps should allow users to select one
  path among several that best suits their learning
  style and needs

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Design for different learners

• Apathetic learners
• Do not care about instructional environment
• Do not explore interface features
• Take a linear path through the application
• Rarely deviate from most linear path and stick
  with it
• Have no notion of educational goal
• Appear unmotivated to engage in more elaborate,
  meaningful exploration

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Conclusion

• Multimedia and multimodality offer virtually
  unlimited opportunities for application designers
  and choosers to enrich and enhance the
  interactive experience and the learning
  experience for all types of learners, but much is
  still to be clarified about the ways sensory
  systems interact to predict when a mixture of
  modalities may supplement and when they might
  interfere with each other .