From The Theme

KNOWLEDGE WORKER PRODUCTIVITY

WHAT IF
What if we could develop a theory of “social affordances” (properties of technologies that shape online social interaction, personal judgment, and social decision-making) to better understand and even predict the effects of media design choices on behavior?

WHAT WE SET OUT TO DO
We set out to examine the influence of online design environments on social expectations and behaviors. Our approach analyzed design as a contextual influence on how users of digital media technologies psychologically process their environment and the information within it.
We conducted two experiments on information selection behavior to see how the presentation and grouping of options affects user information choices.

WHAT WE FOUND
We found that, in a variety of choice situations, people selecting information base their choices not just on their pre-existing preferences, but to a large extent on grouping and partitioning of choices supplied in the interface. Our findings on partition-dependent diversification in information choices offer insights into how to improve interface design. These understandings can help designers use categorization strategically to optimize information consumption and facilitate better decision-making.

LEARN MORE
Sukumaran, A., Vezich, S., McHugh, M., & Nass, C. (2011, May). Normative influences on thoughtful online participation. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3401-3410). ACM.

PEOPLE BEHIND THE PROJECT
The Late Clifford Nass was the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University. Dr. Nass founded and directed the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab, which focuses on the psychology and design of how people interact with technology, the CARS Lab, a research community that is re-envisioning the automobilte, and the REVS Program at Stanford University, which focuses on a transdisciplinary approach to the past, present and future of the automobile.

At the time of the project, Abhay Sukermaran was a Ph.D. candidate in Communication at Stanford University and a researcher at the CHiMe Lab at Stanford University, with a background in human-computer interaction design (MS Stanford ’06). Mr. Sukumaran’s research investigated how social technologies reshape individual understanding of their social environment and their implications for social judgment and online behavior. As of 2017, he was Product Manager at DoorDash.