Nikhil Sharma
Research lead for voice search
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The interacting effects of distributed work arrangements and individual dispositions on willingness to engage in sensemaking behaviors
Peter Gray
Brian Butler
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (2015)
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Faced with highly competitive and dynamic environments, organizations are increasingly investing in technologies that provide them with new options for structuring work. At the same time, firms are increasingly dependent on employees' willingness and ability to make sense of novel tasks, problems, and rapidly changing situations. Yet, in spite of its importance, the impact of technology-enabled distributed work arrangements on sensemaking behavior is largely unknown. Sensemaking remains something that is perceived by many to be an idiosyncratic behavior that is, at best, loosely related to sociotechnical context and culture. Drawing on previous studies of cognitive dispositions (need for cognition, tendency for decisiveness, intolerance for ambiguity, and close-mindedness) and research on how technology-enabled distributed work arrangements affect interpersonal interaction, we theorize how workgroup geographic distribution interacts with individual cognitive differences to affect employees' willingness to engage in the core sociocognitive activities of sensemaking. Our results show that the consequences of individual tendencies can vary under different work arrangements, suggesting that managers seeking to facilitate sensemaking activities must make careful choices about the composition of distributed work groups, as well as how collaboration technologies can be used to encourage sensemaking behaviors.
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Trust, transparency & control in inferred user interest models
Sebastian Schnorf
CHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2014), pp. 2449-2454
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This paper explores the importance of transparency and control to users in the context of inferred user interests. More specifically, we illustrate the association between various levels of control the users have on their inferred interests and users' trust in organizations that provide corresponding content. Our results indicate that users value transparency and control very differently. We segment users in two groups, one who states to not care about their personal interest model and another group that desires some level of control. We found substantial differences in trust impact between segments, depending on actual control option provided.
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Photographing information needs: the role of photos in experience sampling method-style research
Zhen Yue, Carrie Cai, Jeff Stern, Eden Litt,
Kathy Baxter
George Zhang
CHI '14 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2014), pp. 1545-1554
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The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) enables researchers to capture information about participants' experiences in the moment. Adding an end-of-day retrospective survey also allows participants to elaborate on those experiences. Although the use of photos in retrospective interviews and surveys for memory elicitation is well known, little research has investigated the use of photos in ESM studies. As smartphone adoption increases facilitating ESM studies and making photo sharing easier, researchers need to continuously evaluate the method and investigate the role of photos in such studies. We conducted a large-scale ESM and retrospective survey study via Android smartphones with more than 1,000 US participants, and analyzed participants' photo submissions, including how photo use correlated with participants' data quality and what, if any, value photos added for researchers. Our study sheds light on the role of photos in ESM and retrospective studies that researchers can reference when constructing future study designs.
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