Providing Social Feedback in Information Work

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Information tools (such as programming environments, web applications, or word processors) are used by people everyday to complete a wide variety of tasks. While people often learn how to complete tasks using their information tools, they most often make do with novice skills or basic knowledge. Without higher levels of expertise many people are not able to perform as well as they potentially could, which can lead to work that is slower and of lower quality. While a number of solutions exist to ease the transition from novice to expert (e.g., tutorials), a critical factor in learning and behaviour change is people’s perception of whether new behaviour and skills have been successfully used by others. The problem addressed by this proposal is that current information tools do not provide appropriate support for people to learn from the strategies and techniques that have been successful for other people. Without this support people will continue to complete tasks in an inefficient manner. To address this problem, this research will apply the idea of social feedback – support derived from the captured behaviour of other information workers. Social feedback builds on theories of how people learn from others, and how people can be persuaded and motivated to adopt new behaviour when using technology. A social feedback tool provides support by following three basic steps: it captures usage behaviour from a group of people as they use an application; it identifies expert skills and desirable behaviour from the captured data; and, finally, by visualizing this data it allows people to see how their skills compare to experts and to learn how they might improve. While social feedback can allow people to complete common tasks more efficiently and with higher quality outcomes, research in this area is still limited. In particular, this research tackles three challenges to the successful deployment of social feedback systems: 1) the requirement for feedback to be provided at the right time and place in order for it to be useful; 2) the difficulty people have with recalling newly learned skills and behaviour; and, 3) the challenge of motivating people to learn new skills and improve their expertise. This proposal contains six separate projects that investigate these challenges within three new application domains (crowdsourcing, programmer education and energy consumption). This research has strong potential to provide economic and social benefits to many types of work where information tools are used. We will create several technologies that provide data-collection mechanisms, visualization techniques, and design guidelines that allow developers to add social feedback into their existing software. We will also demonstrate the use of social feedback in three specific areas of high interest to the general public and to my industrial partners, who will play an important role in contributing to this work. This research will provide opportunities for HQP to receive training in cutting-edge technologies based in the domains of application, and position them well for further training or advanced positions within industry. This work will advance the understanding of social feedback systems by providing new mechanisms for people to improve their skills with information tools, which will have a positive impact on their productivity and everyday work experiences.