Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye’s research while affiliated with Mountain View College and other places

In March, 2007, a forum entitled HCI 2020: Human Values in a Digital Age, was held in Sanlúcar la Mayor, Spain, just outside Seville. Its purpose was to gather luminaries in computing, design, social sciences, and scientific philosophy to discuss, debate and help formulate an agenda for human-computer interaction (HCI) over the next decade and beyond. This resulted in a detailed report, released in April 2008, in the form of a book called Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 20201, authored by 45 members of the wider HCI community. In this panel, we shall build from four core questions. How successfully did the HCI 2020 forum and report recognize trends and shape HCI? What major trends or issues did they fail to anticipate? How valuable to the HCI community, to the participants, and to the sponsoring organizations was the forum and the report? And finally, what does this history suggest about both the process and the ultimate value to HCI, to computing in general, and to the world, of creating a HCI 2035 vison?.

With technical performance being similar for various web browsers, improving user perceived performance is integral to optimizing browser quality. We investigated the importance of priming, which has a well-documented ability to affect people's beliefs, on users' perceptions of web browser performance. We studied 1495 participants who read either an article about performance improvements to Mozilla Firefox, an article about user interface updates to Firefox, or an article about self-driving cars, and then watched video clips of browser tasks. As the priming effect would suggest, we found that reading articles about Firefox increased participants' perceived performance of Firefox over the most widely used web browser, Google Chrome. In addition, we found that article content mattered, as the article about performance improvements led to higher performance ratings than the article about UI updates. Our findings demonstrate how perceived performance can be improved without making technical improvements and that designers and developers must consider a wider picture when trying to improve user attitudes about technology.

Voice has become a widespread and commercially viable interaction mechanism with the introduction of voice assistants (VAs), such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana. Despite their prevalence, we do not have a detailed understanding of how these technologies are used in domestic spaces. To understand how people use VAs, we conducted interviews with 19 users, and analyzed the log files of 82 Amazon Alexa devices, totaling 193,665 commands, and 88 Google Home Devices, totaling 65,499 commands. In our analysis, we identified music, search, and IoT usage as the command categories most used by VA users. We explored how VAs are used in the home, investigated the role of VAs as scaffolding for Internet of Things device control, and characterized emergent issues of privacy for VA users. We conclude with implications for the design of VAs and for future research studies of VAs.

As a scholarly field, the ACM SIGCHI community maintains a strong focus on conferences as its main outlet for scholarly publication. Historically, this originates in how the field of computer science adopted a conference-centric publication model as well as in the organizational focus of ACM. Lately, this model has become increasingly challenged for a number of reasons, and multiple alternatives are emerging within the SIGCHI community as well as in adjacent communities. Through revisiting examples from other conferences and neighboring communities, this panel explores alternative publication paths and their opportunities and risks.

Voice interfaces such as in-home and mobile digital assistants, mobile screen readers, and chatbots are tools that can support communication, collaboration, and information seeking, and are becoming increasingly commonplace. Because they don't require the motor skills needed for text input through a keyboard, the barriers of entry and use for older adults and people with disabilities are lowered. Yet, accessibility of speech interaction can still be a challenge. Using and designing voice interfaces is radically different from graphical interfaces, redefining how we must think about accessibility and what it means for a conversation to be accessible. This workshop invites submissions from researchers whose work advances the study of, design, and use of voice-based interfaces by older adults and people with disabilities. At the workshop, we will 1) explore recent advances in accessibility and voice interface research, 2) situate voice-based accessibility in prior work and existing theoretical frameworks, 3) discuss open challenges in the design of voice-based systems, and 4) identify opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration to continue research in this field.

The 'blank slate problem' - the difficulty of initial use upon using a new program - is a common user experience problem. In this paper, we explore one solution: importing data from a similar product. Our team created a feature for our browser onboarding process that automatically imports data from the user's pre-existing browser. We then conducted remote, unmoderated usability studies and quantitative experiments. Our initial findings show that autoimport can solve the blank slate problem by getting users started quickly with the browser, but introduces issues related to perceived privacy and performance. We provide recommendations that can impact design decisions related to user data and user perceptions of their privacy, particularly as it relates to tech proficiency.

In this panel, we discuss the challenges that are faced by HCI practitioners and researchers as they study how voice assistants (VA) are used on a daily basis. Voice has become a widespread and commercially viable interaction mechanism with the introduction of VAs such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, the Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana. Despite their prevalence, the design of VAs and their embeddedness with other personal technologies and daily routines have yet to be studied in detail. Making use of a roundtable, we will discuss these issues by providing a number of VA use scenarios that panel members will discuss. Some of the issues that researchers will discuss in this panel include: (1) obtaining VA data & privacy concerns around the processing and storage of user data; (2) the personalization of VAs and the user value derived from this interaction; and (3) the relevant UX work that reflects on the design of VAs?

Web users are increasingly turning to ad blockers to avoid ads, which are often perceived as annoying or an invasion of privacy. While there has been significant research into the factors driving ad blocker adoption and the detrimental effect to ad publishers on the Web, the resulting effects of ad blocker usage on Web users' browsing experience is not well understood. To approach this problem, we conduct a retrospective natural field experiment using Firefox browser usage data, with the goal of estimating the effect of adblocking on user engagement with the Web. We focus on new users who installed an ad blocker after a baseline observation period, to avoid comparing different populations. Their subsequent browser activity is compared against that of a control group, whose members do not use ad blockers, over a corresponding observation period, controlling for prior baseline usage. In order to estimate causal effects, we employ propensity score matching on a number of other features recorded during the baseline period. In the group that installed an ad blocker, we find significant increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over control) and the number of pages viewed (+15% over control), while seeing no change in the number of searches. Additionally, by reapplying the same methodology to other popular Firefox browser extensions, we show that these effects are specific to ad blockers. We conclude that ad blocking has a positive impact on user engagement with the Web, suggesting that any costs of using ad blockers to users' browsing experience are largely drowned out by the utility that they offer.