Social Media and Information Overload: Survey Results

A UK-based online questionnaire investigating aspects of usage of user-generated media (UGM), such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, attracted 587 participants. Results show a high degree of engagement with social networking media such as Facebook, and a significant engagement with other media such as professional media, microblogs and blogs. Participants who experience information overload are those who engage less frequently with the media, rather than those who have fewer posts to read. Professional users show different behaviours to social users. Microbloggers complain of information overload to the greatest extent. Two thirds of Twitter-users have felt that they receive too many posts, and over half of Twitter-users have felt the need for a tool to filter out the irrelevant posts. Generally speaking, participants express satisfaction with the media, though a significant minority express a range of concerns including information overload and privacy

Social Networking Services on Mobile Devices: User Interface Designs and User Experience Studies

People commonly use social networking services (SNSs) on their mobile devices. Web sites, mobile applications and mobile widgets are the typical user interfaces (UIs) used to access SNSs. These UIs are restricted to content from single services, which constrain people’s simultaneous browsing of multiple SNSs. Previous studies propose workarounds – such as displaying SNS content in augmented phonebooks – to combine multiple SNSs. These studies, however, do not provide a genuine solution to the user’s problem. The objective of this dissertation is to explore novel UI designs for in-depth integration of multiple SNSs on a mobile device and to evaluate the user experience (UX) that these designs support. Here UX covers a person's perceptions and responses in using an interactive product. This dissertation explores mobile use of SNSs from a human–computer interaction (HCI) perspective. Following the design research approach, the study investigated novel means of using multiple SNSs on mobile devices in a concept called ‘LinkedUI’. The work focused on SNSs, although the results could also be relevant to mobile use of other Web services. Three main results emerged from this research. Firstly, in their use of mobile devices, people prefer to be aware of relevant SNS content when taking micro breaks. They often do not aim for concrete goals other than keeping informed and updated. Current UIs limit these browsing activities, as people need to interact with UI elements intensively before accessing the content in which they are interested. Secondly, LinkedUI introduces a holistic device UI – regulating all functions of a mobile device – based on hypertext navigation. This supports aggregation of content from multiple services and automatic filtering to highlight relevant content. User evaluations showed that these designs contributed to positive user experiences of SNS use on mobile devices. The third main result addresses usage patterns and user experiences of LinkedUI like mobile UIs. People frequently check SNSs in brief sessions. They attend to content selectively, mainly content directed to them, recently shared, or shared by relevant contacts. These factors aid in prediction of the relevance of the SNS content. In terms of UX, LinkedUI rewards users with enhanced awareness experience. It is easy to use and grants users a sufficient sense of control in the face of constant information flow. The main contribution of this dissertation is to characterise user activities on the mobile Web, while the associated research created and evaluated novel means for accessing SNSs on mobile devices. Research discussed in this dissertation resulted in UI designs that explored one potential direction for the future mobile UI development and influenced the Notifications home view of some Nokia Symbian and MeeGo smartphones. This dissertation reveals usage patterns and UX associated with mobile use of SNSs, and it proposes implications for future research and development in this domain

Understanding the Participatory News Consumer

Analyzes survey findings on the impact of social media and mobile connectivity on news consumption behavior by demographics and political affiliation. Examines sources; topics; participation by sharing, commenting on, or creating news; and views on media

Collaborating with Users in Proximity for Decentralized Mobile Recommender Systems

Typically, recommender systems from any domain, be it movies, music, restaurants, etc., are organized in a centralized fashion. The service provider holds all the data, biases in the recommender algorithms are not transparent to the user, and the service providers often create lock-in effects making it inconvenient for the user to switch providers. In this paper, we argue that the user's smartphone already holds a lot of the data that feeds into typical recommender systems for movies, music, or POIs. With the ubiquity of the smartphone and other users in proximity in public places or public transportation, data can be exchanged directly between users in a device-to-device manner. This way, each smartphone can build its own database and calculate its own recommendations. One of the benefits of such a system is that it is not restricted to recommendations for just one user - ad-hoc group recommendations are also possible. While the infrastructure for such a platform already exists - the smartphones already in the palms of the users - there are challenges both with respect to the mobile recommender system platform as well as to its recommender algorithms. In this paper, we present a mobile architecture for the described system - consisting of data collection, data exchange, and recommender system - and highlight its challenges and opportunities.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2019 IEEE 16th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (IEEE UIC 2019

Collaborative Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays - BigWallHCI 2013 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop

The 3rd JRC ECML Crisis Management Technology Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction with Big Wall Displays in Situation Rooms and Monitoring Centres was co-organised by the European Commission Joint Research Centre and the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, Austria. It took place in the European Crisis Management Laboratory (ECML) of the JRC in Ispra, Italy, from 18 to 19 April 2013. 40 participants from stakeholders in the EC, civil protection bodies, academia, and industry attended the workshop. The hardware of large display areas is on the one hand mature since many years and on the other hand changing rapidly and improving constantly. This high pace developments promise amazing new setups with respect to e.g., pixel density or touch interaction. On the software side there are two components with room for improvement: 1. the software provided by the display manufacturers to operate their video walls (source selection, windowing system, layout control) and 2. dedicated ICT systems developed to the very needs of crisis management practitioners and monitoring centre operators. While industry starts to focus more on the collaborative aspects of their operating software already, the customized and tailored ICT applications needed are still missing, unsatisfactory, or very expensive since they have to be developed from scratch many times. Main challenges identified to enhance big wall display systems in crisis management and situation monitoring contexts include: 1. Interaction: Overcome static layouts and/or passive information consumption. 2. Participatory Design & Development: Software needs to meet users’ needs. 3. Development and/or application of Information Visualisation & Visual Analytics principle to support the transition from data to information to knowledge. 4. Information Overload: Proper methods for attention management, automatic interpretation, incident detection, and alarm triggering are needed to deal with the ever growing amount of data to be analysed.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Social Computing: An Overview

A collection of technologies termed social computing is driving a dramatic evolution of the Web, matching the dot-com era in growth, excitement, and investment. All of these share high degree of community formation, user level content creation, and computing, and a variety of other characteristics. We provide an overview of social computing and identify salient characteristics. We argue that social computing holds tremendous disruptive potential in the business world and can significantly impact society, and outline possible changes in organized human action that could be brought about. Social computing can also have deleterious effects associated with it, including security issues. We suggest that social computing should be a priority for researchers and business leaders and illustrate the fundamental shifts in communication, computing, collaboration, and commerce brought about by this trend