Michael Froehlich

Center for Digital Technology and Management | CDTM

We evaluate the impact of participation in an entrepreneurship education program during university on subsequent entrepreneurial activity by comparing career decisions between program participants and the best applicants not accepted to the program using a regression discontinuity design. We find that program participation increases both founding r...

Blockchain technology is believed to have a potential for innovation comparable to the early internet. However, it is difficult to understand, learn, and use. A particular challenge for teaching software engineering of blockchain applications is identifying suitable use cases: When does a decentralized application running on smart contracts offer a...

More than forty years after the creation of the first online messaging board, the quality of online discussion culture remains a topic of significant scientific and public debate. Social media platforms have struggled to maintain a free marketplace of ideas while addressing issues such as censorship, propaganda, and misinformation. Traditional meth...

This dissertation investigates the usability challenges faced by cryptocurrency users and explores how human-computer interaction (HCI) can help address these challenges. The research is conducted through three approaches: (1) a systematic review of HCI research on cryptocurrency, which finds that existing research has focused largely on Bitcoin an...

Cryptocurrencies have the potential to improve financial inclusion. However, the technology is complex to understand and difficult to use. Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) can play a vital role in improving accessibility by identifying and overcoming challenges that hold users back. However, most HCI studies have focused only on Bitcoin and Ethereu...

There is an increasingly diverse range of smart-contract blockchains on which decentralized applications (dApps) are built. However, HCI research has so far failed to address them, focusing primarily on Bitcoin and Ethereum. This is problematic as these new blockchains come with an increasingly diverse set of properties that influence the usability...

The growing use of supervised machine learning in research and industry has increased the need for labeled datasets. Crowdsourcing has emerged as a popular method to create data labels. However, working on large batches of tasks leads to worker fatigue, negatively impacting labeling quality. To address this, we present TruEyes, a collaborative crow...

We present a systematic literature review of cryptocurrency and blockchain research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) published between 2014 and 2021. We aim to provide an overview of the field, consolidate existing knowledge, and chart paths for future research. Our analysis of 99 articles identifies six major themes: (1) the role of trust, (2)...

The voluntary carbon market is an important building block in the fight against climate change. However, it is not trivial for consumers to verify whether carbon offset projects deliver what they promise. While technical solutions for measuring their impact are emerging, there is a lack of understanding of how to translate this data into interface...

Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity in recent years. However, for many users, keeping ownership of their cryptocurrency is a complex task. News reports frequently bear witness to scams, hacked exchanges, and fortunes beyond retrieval. However, we lack a systematic understanding of user-centered cryptocurrency threats, as causes leading to loss...

Cryptocurrencies have increasingly gained interest in practice and research alike. Current research in the HCI community predominantly focuses on understanding the behavior of existing cryptocurrency users. Little attention has been given to early users and the challenges they encounter. However, understanding how interfaces of cryptocurrency syste...

Engaging first-time users of mobile apps is challenging. Onboarding task flows are designed to minimize the drop out of users. To this point, there is little scientific insight into how to design these task flows. We explore this question with a specific focus on financial applications, which pose a particularly high hurdle and require significant...

In recent years, cryptocurrencies have increasingly gained interest. The underlying technology, Blockchain, shifts the responsibility for securing assets to the end-user and requires them to manage their (private) keys. Little attention has been given to how cryptocurrency users handle the challenges of key management in practice and how they selec...