Internet Experiences

By Elizabeth Churchill


Creating new Internet experiences, enhancing those that already exist, and developing applications and services that give long term value necessitates we better understand the churn of uptake, adoption, modification and abandonment of internet infrastructures, services and applications. We need to better understand how the Internet is woven into people's when they are offline, online, and partially connected on-the-go.

The Internet Experiences Group at Yahoo! Research focuses on understanding how people experience the Internet. We study how/when/where/why people get online, and how they encounter, seek, find, produce, and share information when they are online. We look at how online actions affect offline behaviours. We have two goals: first, to understand how access to the Internet affects everyday lives and second, to develop new Internet experiences that people value.

We take a human activity centered viewpoint - aiming to see the Internet as its 'users' see it. Methodologically, we adopt a mixed-methods approach: analysis of logged activity data, field interviews and field studies, surveys, and the design and deployment of interactive prototypes.

We are currently addressing several key areas, each of which has a number of challenging research questions.


Challenges

Internet Sociality

Social theory tells us that people are very adept at managing social relationships. Yet the Internet is changing the landscape of social connection. How are people finding new connections, fostering existing ones and maintaining social boundaries between the different social groups in which they participate? How are people managing their social relationships online? And how is online connection changing offline socializing? Do patterns of adoption and social adaptation vary across cultural groups – and if so, how?

Conversational Media

The Internet is increasingly about creating, viewing and sharing rich media experiences - experiences that are routinely shared between individuals through posted and forwarded links, and through annotations, comments and tags. We are also seeing a revolution in sharing as we move toward a synchronous, “real time web” and there are new forms of online congregation emerging - it is now possible for people who are not collocated physically to create a shared experience of a distant event by chatting and conversing concurrently with the event. How are these new channels of concurrent conversation changing how we experience media and experience events? How is the “real time web” changing our relationship to each other, but also distant places and events?

The Mobile Internet

Every day more people access the Internet using personal, mobile devices like laptops and cell phones. How is this mobile access to the Internet – and the potential for constant connection to people and information - changing the way people interact with services, with applications and with each other? How do we design effective applications and services for different demographics and different social settings?

Internet Literacy and Creativity

How do people find out about and learn to use new Internet applications? How are people expressing themselves online? What new forms of literacy and creativity are emerging on the Internet? How, when and why do they personalize/configure Internet applications? What kinds of applications and features best support end-user self-expression and creativity? What are barriers to application adoption and self-expression and to participation more generally?

Meaningful Instrumentation

Activity and interaction data are logged by most application and devices as a matter of course. Most logging protocols foreground system operations for debugging and optimization. What forms of device instrumentation what metrics best reflect user experience of the Internet across different devices and applications? What new forms of "experience logging" are emerging? What does a human centered, Internet logging and data analysis paradigm look like?