Information School Technical Report Repository

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/1976

The Office of Research maintains a repository for the publication and storage of a broad range of artifacts generated by the research, scholarship, and creative activities of faculty, staff, students, and collaborators of the Information School. The repository functions as a venue for the publication, dissemination, reporting, and promotion of the intellectual and programmatic work of the Information School community.

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Coding Manual for Barriers and Solutions to Employment for Homeless Young People
(2013-01-10) Woelfer, Jill Palzkill; Duong, Thuy T; Hendry, David G.
This technical report presents a coding manual for analyzing a body of material related to the barriers and solutions to employment for homeless young people. The coding manual, which shows good inter-rater reliability, consists of two major codes, namely “Barrier,” and “Solution,” along with 28 sub-codes. Sub-codes within “Barrier” include “Lacks related to the individual,” “Employer-related,” “Societal-related,” and “Technology-related.” Under “Lacks related to the individual” are 12 sub-codes including lack of “Non-stigmatizing address,” lack of “Government-issued ID,” and lack of “Encouraging Experiences.” Within “Solution” there are 12 sub-codes including “Resources,” “Networking,” and “Youth-based priority.” In addition to the coding manual, the technical report also includes a summary of its development and measures of its reliability.
Coding Manual for "What Will it Take to End Homelessness?"
(2013-01-07) Woelfer, Jill Palzkill; Hendry, David G
This technical report presents a coding manual for analyzing a body of material related to the causes or explanations of homelessness, opportunities and solutions for addressing homelessness, or related aspects. The coding manual, which shows good inter-rater reliability, consists of three major codes, namely “Structural Factors,” “Individual Factors,” and “Not Possible to End Homelessness,” along with 16 sub-codes. The technical report also includes a summary of the development of the coding manual and measures of reliability, all 109 excerpts that were used in the construction of the manual, a summary of the codes applied to the excerpts, and a tutorial on the calculation of Cohen’s Kappa.
Phase II Investigation: The Future of Information Seeking & Services Expo
(University of Washington School of Information, 2011-12-31) Eisenberg, Michael B.; Lin, Peyina; Marino, John; Karlova, Natascha
The Future InfoExpo was important because it demonstrates “proof of concept” of new or expanded functions and capabilities in 3D, immersive virtual environments and offers clear directions for future research. Users and information providers experienced, envisioned, and evaluated possible information practices in virtual environments and provided feedback on their experience.
XooML: XML in Support of Many Tools Working on a Single Organization of Personal Information
(2010-10-10) Jones, William
XooML takes a step towards addressing a basic tension in the development of supporting tools of Personal Information Man-agement (PIM) and, more generally, in the development of com-puter-based tools for end users: How to innovate without forcing people to re-organize or re-locate their information?. Seven con-siderations in the design of a XooML schema follow from expe-riences in the iterative evaluation and development of a Planz prototype. Considerations take aim on a vision of PIM: One, inte-grative structure for the organization of personal information; many tools in support of this structure, its creation and its life-long development.
Multi-lifespan Information System Design in the Aftermath of Genocide: An Early-Stage Report from Rwanda
(2010-01-12T16:08:59Z) Friedman, Batya; Nathan, Lisa P.; Lake, Milli; Grey, Nell Carden; Nilsen, Trond T.; Utter, Robert F.; Utter, Elizabeth J.; Ring, Mark; Kahn, Zoe
In this paper we report on our research and design efforts to provide Rwandans with access to and reuse of video interviews from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. More generally, we investigate methods and designs that can be deployed successfully within a post-conflict political climate concerned about recurring violence. We describe our general approach and report three case studies with diverse sectors of Rwandan society: governmental information centres, youth clubs, and a grassroots organization working with victims of sexual violence. We use five indicators to assess the success and limitations of our approach: diverse stakeholders; diverse uses; on-going use; cultural, linguistic and geographic reach; and Rwandan initiative. This work makes three important contributions: first, it directly supports the Rwandan people in their efforts to achieve justice, healing and reconciliation; second, it provides the HCI community with methods and approaches for undertaking information and interaction design in post-conflict situations; third, it describes the first empirical exploration of multi-lifespan information system design.
Multi-lifespan Information System Design in the Aftermath of Genocide: An Early-Stage Report from Rwanda
(2010-01-09T01:39:12Z) Friedman, Batya; Nathan, Lisa P.; Lake, Milli; Grey, Nell Carden; Nilsen, Trond T.; Utter, Robert F.; Utter, Elizabeth J.; Ring, Mark; Kahn, Zoe
Design Talk in a Community of Innovators
(2006-05-19T19:56:40Z) Hendry, David; Kilburn, Shawn; Annabi, Hala; Mai, Jens-Erik
This technical report describes an exploratory analysis of a community of innovators who indirectly contributed to the design of del.icio.us, a system for social tagging. Participants in this community, which is mediated primarily by an e-mail listserv and guided by a de-facto moderator, envision and reflect upon systems for social tagging. The analysis of a sample of messages shows that participants evoke patterns of conversation that promote reflection and creativity. This finding, in turn, leads to opportunities for enhancing social creativity and the management of design knowledge in computer mediated spaces.
Personal Information Management
(2005-11-08T17:14:37Z) Jones, William
Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to both the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain and retrieve information for everyday use. One ideal of PIM is that we always have the right information in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to meet our current need<jones 2004> (W. Jones & Maier, 2003). Tools and technologies help us spend less time with time-consuming and error-prone actions of information management (such as filing). We then have more time to make creative, intelligent use of the information at hand in order to get things done. This ideal is far from the reality for most people. A wide range of tools and technologies are now available for the management of personal information . But this diversity has become part of the problem leading to information fragmentation <ref Jones 04>.. A person may maintain several separate, roughly comparable but inevitably inconsistent, organizational schemes for electronic documents, paper documents, email messages and web references. The number of organizational schemes may increase if a person has several email accounts, uses separate computers for home and work, uses a PDA or a smart phone, or uses any of a bewildering number of special-purpose PIM tools. Interest in the study of PIM has increased in recent years with the growing realization that new applications, new gadgets, for all the targeted help they provide, often do so at the expense of increasing the overall complexity of PIM. Microsoft’s OneNote, for example, provides many useful features for note-taking but also forces the use of a separate tabbed system for the organization of these notes that does not integrate with existing organizations for files, email messages or web references. Users can rightly complain that this is “one organization too many” (R. Boardman & Sasse, 2004; R. Boardman, Spence, & Sasse, 2003)
An Overview of Tactile Graphics Production and HCI Barriers in Existing Software Resources
(2005-08-31T15:20:44Z) Slabosky, Beverly; Ivory, Melody Y.; Martin, Andrew P.; Lacenski, Amelia
Through the use of an on-line questionnaire and in-depth observation sessions, we examined how people produce tactile graphics (raised images that are designed to be read by the fingers) for blind students and how they use software applications during tactile graphics production. We found that tactile graphics specialists shy away from using applications, even though their production methods are labor and time intensive. Half of the participants did not use a computer at all and those who did relied upon simple drawing functionality, such as Microsoft Word’s drawing tools, as opposed to fully featured drawing systems like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Participants considered fully featured drawing systems to be cumbersome, non-intuitive, and overkill for their needs. Nonetheless, these tools have valuable image processing algorithms, which could help them to streamline their work practices. Bridging the gap between their current and new software-based practices is an interesting human-computer interaction problem. The cost of not addressing this HCI problem is tremendous, because over 93,000 school-age children will be left behind.
Helping Users to Use Online Resources to Resolve Information Technology Problems: An Opportunity for the Semantic Web
(2005-08-29T15:53:38Z) Ivory, Melody Y.; Martin, Andrew P.; Megraw, Rodrick; Slabosky, Beverly
Users need help systems to support their use of complex information technology (IT); however, several studies have shown help systems to be inadequate. To identify ways in which to improve help systems, we administered an online questionnaire to 107 IT users from diverse populations. The questionnaire probed users’ current perceptions and use of help systems that are within software applications, web sites, and mobile devices. A major finding was that two-thirds of users reported that they use web-based content to help them to resolve IT problems; use of web-based content superseded their use of printed and electronic documentation and their communication with technical support specialists and other people. Our study also revealed accessibility issues with online questionnaire systems; we describe specific problems and how we addressed them. Based on our findings, we propose the development of a portal system to harvest help content from various sources, organize intelligently the content, and enable users to search or browse for help on specific IT problems. We consider the system to be an ideal application for the Semantic Web and advocate research and industry collaboration to develop the necessary infrastructure.
Exploring the Persistent Problem of User Assistance
(2005-08-25T17:29:02Z) Martin, Andrew P.; Ivory, Melody Y.; Megraw, Rodrick; Slabosky, Beverly
Users continue to report problems with user assistance systems. We conducted a study within three populations that have a stake in the user assistance process: users, developers (anyone who plays a role in creating the help interface, content, or functionality), and technical support providers. We administered a Web-based questionnaire to members of the three populations. Our preliminary study suggests that: (1) many users experience some difficulty with using user assistance; (2) users use Web-based content most frequently when they need assistance; (3) developers’ perceptions of users lead them to develop less popular forms of user assistance and for tasks with which users have fewer problems; and (4) technical support providers address this gap by supporting users on tasks for which user assistance is missing or inadequate and by developing supplemental resources to help users.
In Support of External Representations for Personal Information Management
(2005-08-17) Jones, William; Munat, Charles; Foxley, Austin; Bruce, Harry
This article describes research that looks at how structure is now used and might be better used in support of personal information management (PIM). Efforts to structure personal information find expression in various external representations (ERs) such as folder hierarchies, physical piles and analogous groupings of items on a computer desktop, user-assigned property/value combinations, annotations, file and folder names including leading characters, etc. But the ways in which these ERs develop over time and the roles they play in the management of personal information are poorly understood and poorly supported. Fieldwork is described that identifies several opportunities for improved support of ERs to manage personal information. A Project Planner prototype supports a rich-text outline view for the creation of ERs (project plans). Project plans can be used not only to represent the structure of a project but also to organize information (electronic documents, email messages, web pages) required to complete the project. The Project Planner works by extending, rather than trying to replace, the user’s current file folder structure. The Planner works as an extension to the file manager to provide people with rich-text overlays to their information.
Coding Manual for “The Watcher and The Watched: Social Judgments about Privacy in a Public Place”
(2005-07-13T16:27:29Z) Hagman, Jennifer; Severson, Rachel L.; Friedman, Batya; Kahn, Jr., Peter H.
How do people reason about privacy when sophisticated cameras capture people’s images in a public space? Toward answering this question, we interviewed 120 participants in one of four conditions. All conditions involved a HDTV camera on top of a university building that overlooked a public plaza. In one condition, 30 participants were in the office of the university building with a view through a window onto the public plaza. In a second condition, 30 participants were in the same office except that now the window was covered with a large display, and real-time HDTV image of the public plaza was displayed on the large-display “window.” In a third condition, 30 participants were in the original office after it had been closed off with drapes (in effect, an inside office). In a fourth condition, 30 participants were in the public plaza. This technical report provides the coding manual used to code the reasoning of the participants in all conditions, emphasizing the perspectives of “The Watcher” and “The Watched.” By a coding manual we mean a philosophically and empirically grounded means for coding social-cognitive data. The coding manual was developed from half of the interview data, and then applied to the entire interview data set. Our goal is to present this manual such that – as part of an on-going iterative scientific process – it can be used and modified by others interested in investigating people’s conceptions of privacy in public, especially in the context of technologically-mediated interactions.
Reflections on Usable Privacy for Location-Awareness Systems
(2005-06-29T18:00:12Z) Friedman, Batya
For the past decade, the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab now at the University of Washington has been investigating privacy in public in relation to information technologies. More recently, we have begun collaborations with the Intel Research Seattle lab to extend those investigations to location-awareness technologies. In this brief paper, I offer ten propositions for privacy in the context of location-awareness technologies that have emerged from our work and continue to guide it. Finally, I end with a “deign to think with” for usable privacy.
Coding Manual for "The Distant Gardener: What Conversations in the Telegarden Reveal about Human-Telerobotic Interaction"
(2005-06-16T23:49:29Z) Friedman, Batya; Alexander, Irene S.; Kahn, Jr., Peter H.
The Telegarden is a small plot of earth encircling an industrial robotic arm. A web-based interface allows users to activate the robotic arm, view the garden through a camera mounted on the robotic arm, change the view, plant a seed, water it, and (if one is a successful gardener) water the resulting plant on an on-going basis. Many thousands of remote users have interacted with the Telegarden in such ways, and communicated to one another through an associated Telegarden chatroom. The Telegarden was developed under the co-direction of Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana, and it represents an emerging form of human-computer interaction - that of telepresence. In a recent study, we investigated the user experience of nature as mediated by this telerobotic installation by analyzing the conversations in 3 months of associated Telegarden chat (16,504 posts). This technical report provides the full coding manual we used to code the chat data. Our goal is to present this manual such that - as part of an on-going iterative scientific process - it can be used and modified by others interested in investigating human-telerobotic interaction.
Creativity Tasks and Coding System -- Used in the Plasma Display Window Study
(2005-04-05T01:18:41Z) Severson, Rachel L.; Feldman, Erika N.; Kahn, Jr., Peter H.; Friedman, Batya
Few would disagree about the importance of creativity in human life. At the same time, creativity has proved difficult to measure empirically. In this technical report, we describe three creativity tasks – the Droodle Creativity Task, Modified Droodle Creativity Task, and Unusual Uses Creativity Task – and their corresponding coding systems. The first two are new tasks with novel analyses, the third an existing task with a reconceptualized analysis. All three contribute to the broader literature on conceptualizing and measuring creativity.
The Universal Labeler: Plan the Project and Let Your Information Follow
(2005-03-29T19:59:39Z) Jones, William; Munat, Charles; Bruce, Harry
The Universal Labeler (UL) supports a single, unified scheme of “labeling” which can be applied to organize various kinds of information including electronic documents, email messages and web references. The UL takes a project-centered approach to personal information management (PIM): 1. People keep information to get things done – to complete projects (“finish a course”, “re-model a house”, etc.). 2. Project-planning involves problem-solving: A person’s conceptualization of a project can often be characterized as a hierarchy of subproject/tasks. 3. Project structure, if made explicit, can aid not only in planning but also in the organization of related information. Projects, subprojects and tasks are represented by “labels” in the UL. Useful properties and behaviors can be associated with these labels – “remind me by” or due dates, for example. The UL is a step towards the integration of information regardless of its form (e-document, paper, web page) and towards the integration of information management with the management of tasks and projects.
Don’t Take My Folders Away! Organizing Personal Information to Get Things Done
(2005-01-11T16:08:49Z) Jones, William; Phuwanartnurak, Ammy Jiranida; Gill, Rajdeep; Bruce, Harry
A study explores the way people organize information in support of projects (“teach a course”, “plan a wedding”, etc.). The folder structures to organize project information – especially electronic documents and other files – frequently resembled a “divide and conquer” problem decomposition with subfolders corresponding to major components (subprojects) of the project. Folders were clearly more than simply a means to one end: Organizing for later retrieval. Folders were information in their own right – representing, for example, a person’s evolving understanding of a project and its components. Unfortunately, folders are often “overloaded” with information. For example, folders sometimes included leading characters to force an ordering (“aa”, “zz”). And folder hierarchies frequently reflected a tension between organizing information for current use vs. repeated re-use.
SmartSites Toolkit for Evaluating Course Web Sites
(2004-12-17T19:07:14Z) Ivory, Melody Y.
To facilitate the design of effective web sites for classroom-based courses, we developed a systematic heuristic evaluation methodology and relevant heuristics. To facilitate reuse of the methodology, we developed an evaluation toolkit. The toolkit provides detailed instructions on all aspects of the methodology and an example assessment. Assessments that are carried out with the toolkit can reveal the strengths and weaknesses of a course web site. Furthermore, heuristics provide actionable feedback on how to improve sites. The toolkit is available as a zipped archive.
The Web Experience
(2004-12-17T19:06:39Z) Martin, Andrew P.; Ivory, Melody Y.; Groce, Dmitri
We developed an interactive movie to educate people who do not have impairments about how people who do have certain impairments experience the World Wide Web. We walk the viewer through the experiences of five people who are searching for information on the University of Washington's web site. We recreate color blindness, deafness, low vision, attention deficiency, and full blindness. We also provide a few suggestions for creating sites which are usable by the five people. Macromedia Flash Player 6.0 or higher is needed to run the demonstration.

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