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 how the Internet is woven into people's lives 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. We look at how they encounter, seek, find, produce, and share information when they are online. We investigate how they socialize online–how they converse, communicate, cooperate and collaborate with and through Internet based services and applications. We look at how online actions affect offline behaviors.

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 approach to our research–aiming to see the Internet as its 'users' see it. Methodologically, we adopt a mixed-methods approach: analysis of logged activity data from instrumented devices, applications and services; recordings of human action and interaction in real-world settings; lab-based investigations including eyetracking experiments; Internet-based experiments; 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?

Trust and reputation on the Internet

The wide availability of personal information online emphasizes the changing dynamics of trust and reputation. How do people decide whether an individual or his content are reliable, credible, or trustworthy, and how do those determinations depend on social contexts? Judgments about trust and reputation that were once highly personal and contextual are increasingly embodied in reputation systems. How can we design transparent, contextually sensitive reputation systems to facilitate rather than force decision-making while allowing users to manage their privacy?

Conversational media

The Internet is increasingly about creating, viewing and sharing rich media experiences. Further, with the advent of the "real time web" opportunities are also increasingly available for people to experience events and media synchronously even when physically distant. Conversations may take place on-site or in parallel channels, like the Twitter messaging service and social networks like Facebook. How are these new channels of shared experience changing our experience of media events? How are these channels changing our relationship to each other? What new forms of spectatorship, audience and collaborative engagement are emerging?

Mobility, location-based services and the augmented world

Every day more people access the Internet using geo-enabled personal, mobile devices like laptops, tablets and cell phones. How does location change the ways in which services are designed, provided and consumed? How does the potential for constant connection to people and information changing the way people interact with services, with applications and with each other? Furthermore, how is this affecting the way we interact with and observe the physical world around us? With the growing trend in location-specific information filtering and augmentation (including ‘augmented reality’), we ask: how can/do mobile devices and services augment and change our interactions with our day-to-day environments and with each other?

Play, games and gaming

Computer games have been around as long as personal computers, but there has been a rapid upswing in their popularity. Casual games are proliferating on mobile devices and social networking sites. Online single-user and multiplayer games provide increasingly rich experiences for users. “Hardcore” social gaming platforms are evolving into complex social systems. How are different forms of computer gaming becoming part of people's daily social lives? How do particular game features promote user engagement and online sociability? What kinds of communities do games platforms foster?

Methodologies for understanding user action and interaction

New methods are emerging for understanding users’ experiences with devices and applications. We are interested in further developing methods for activity logging, from developing more meaningful forms of instrumentation for devices and applications, to developing new techniques and perspectives for well established methods like eyetracking, to using sensors to record people’s activities as they go about their daily activities. We ask: What forms of user or device instrumentation work best? What measures and metrics best reflect user experience of the Internet across different devices and applications? What new forms of "experience logging" are emerging? What does an ethical, scientifically grounded and human centered activity logging and data analysis paradigm look like?