Interfaces for Obtaining and Providing Information from/to Users

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Speaker
Michael Schober
Professor and Chair, Psychology Department, New School for Social Research

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Web interfaces for obtaining information from users (e.g., web surveys, on-line tax filing, registering new purchases with manufacturers) may differ in important ways from web interfaces in which users obtain information from systems (web searches, help systems, database retrieval tasks). In particular, users providing information to systems may be less concerned with understanding terms precisely, and less willing to request clarification, than users obtaining information from systems. In this talk, experimental evidence will be presented on whether users seek clarification of words in survey questions differently than they do for the same words in a web database retrieval task. In a laboratory experiment, two groups of participants carried out almost identical web-based tasks using the same set of fictional scenarios about purchases and housing, with the same set of standard definitions of terms (words like “bedroom” and “moving”) available for them to request by clicking. The survey group answered questions using these terms taken from ongoing US government surveys (e.g., how many bedrooms are in a house, or whether expenses for moving had been incurred). The database group retrieved information from a numerical table in order to complete a subsequent task (e.g., to determine the price of an apartment based on the number of bedrooms, or to determine the amount of reimbursement that a moving expense allowed). Results indicate that participants were less likely to click for definitions in survey responses than in the database retrieval task, consistent with Clark & Schober’s principle on the “presumption of interpretability.” A taxonomy of interactive tasks needs to include the fundamental direction of information flow—system-to-user vs. user-to-system.

Speaker's Bio

Michael Schober is a psychologist who studies how people coordinate their actions, the mental processes underlying that coordination, and how new technologies mediate coordination. His research deals with interdisciplinary questions in psychology, linguistics, human-computer interaction, music, public opinion research, and sociology. Recent and ongoing studies examine conversational language use and perspective-taking, how differently people can conceive of what they are discussing despite apparent understanding, conceptual misalignment in survey interview and testing interactions, and interfaces for enhancing remote collaboration by chamber musicians and studio design teams. His academic background is in cognitive psychology (Ph.D., Stanford University, 1990) and cognitive science (Sc.B., Brown University, 1986). He is currently Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He is also incoming editor of the journal Discourse Processes.

Speaker's Website
http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty.aspx?id=10406

Host
Susan Fussell