Providing Social Feedback in Information Work

人们每天都在使用信息工具(如编程环境、Web应用程序或字处理程序)来完成各种任务。虽然人们经常学习如何使用他们的信息工具来完成任务，但他们通常会凑合着使用新手技能或基本知识。如果没有更高水平的专业知识，许多人就不能像他们潜在的那样做得很好，这可能会导致工作变得更慢，质量更低。虽然有许多解决方案可以轻松地从新手过渡到专家(例如，教程)，但学习和行为改变的一个关键因素是人们对新行为和技能是否被其他人成功使用的看法。这项提议解决的问题是，目前的信息工具没有为人们提供适当的支持，让他们学习其他人已经成功的战略和技术。没有这种支持，人们将继续以低效的方式完成任务。为了解决这个问题，这项研究将应用社会反馈的想法--从其他信息工作者捕获的行为中获得支持。社会反馈建立在人们如何向他人学习的理论基础上，以及如何说服和激励人们在使用技术时采用新的行为。社交反馈工具通过以下三个基本步骤提供支持：它捕获一组人在使用应用程序时的使用行为；它从捕获的数据中识别专家技能和期望的行为；最后，通过可视化这些数据，它允许人们查看他们的技能与专家相比如何，并了解他们如何改进。虽然社会反馈可以让人们更有效地完成共同的任务，并获得更高质量的结果，但这一领域的研究仍然有限。特别是，这项研究解决了成功部署社会反馈系统的三个挑战：1)要求在正确的时间和地点提供反馈，以使其发挥作用；2)人们在回忆新学到的技能和行为方面存在困难；3)激励人们学习新技能和提高他们的专业知识的挑战。该提案包含六个独立的项目，在三个新的应用领域(众包、程序员教育和能源消耗)调查这些挑战。这项研究具有很强的潜力，可以为使用信息工具的许多类型的工作提供经济和社会效益。我们将创建几种技术，提供数据收集机制、可视化技术和设计指南，允许开发人员将社交反馈添加到他们现有的软件中。我们还将向公众和我的行业合作伙伴展示如何在公众和我的行业合作伙伴感兴趣的三个具体领域使用社会反馈，他们将在这项工作中发挥重要作用。这项研究将为HQP提供接受基于应用领域的尖端技术的培训的机会，并为他们在行业内的进一步培训或高级职位做好准备。这项工作将通过为人们提供新的机制来提高他们使用信息工具的技能，从而促进对社会反馈系统的理解，这将对他们的生产力和日常工作经验产生积极影响。

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.