Papers by Mary Czerwinski
Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018
Information workers are experiencing ever-increasing online distractions in the workplace, and so... more Information workers are experiencing ever-increasing online distractions in the workplace, and software to block distractions is becoming more popular. We conducted an exploratory field study with 32 information workers in their workplace using software to block online distractions for one week. We discovered that with online distractions blocked, participants assessed their focus and productivity to be significantly higher. Those who benefited most were those who reported being less in control of their work, associated with personality traits of lower Conscientiousness and Lack of Perseverence. Unexpectedly, those reporting higher control of work experienced a cost of higher workload with online distractions blocked. Those who reported the greatest increase in focus with distractions blocked were those who were more susceptible to social media distractions. Without distractions, people with higher control of work worked longer stretches without physical breaks, with consequently higher stress. We present design recommendations to promote focus for our observed coping behaviors.
... Amy Kanerva, Kevin Keeker, Kirsten Risden, Eric Schuh, & Mary Czerwinski. ... engineers d... more ... Amy Kanerva, Kevin Keeker, Kirsten Risden, Eric Schuh, & Mary Czerwinski. ... engineers derived items from Lepper's (1988) research on enhancing intrinsic motivation, Whalen's and Cziksentmihalyi's (1991) research on flow states, and UI research by Hix and Hartson (1993). ...
The American Journal of Psychology, 1981
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, 2010
Although there has been significant research into gender regarding educational and workplace prac... more Although there has been significant research into gender regarding educational and workplace practices, there has been little investigation of gender differences pertaining to problem solving with programming tools and environments. As a result, there is little evidence as to what role gender plays in programming tools-and what little evidence there is has involved mainly novice and enduser programmers in academic studies. This paper therefore investigates how widespread such phenomena are in industrial programming situations, considering three disparate programming populations involving almost 3000 people and three different programming platforms in industry. To accomplish this, we analyzed four industry "legacy" studies from a gender perspective, triangulating results against each other and against a new fifth study, also in industry. We investigated gender differences in software feature usage and in tinkering/exploring software features. Furthermore, we examined how such differences tied to confidence. Our results showed significant gender differences in all three factors-across all populations and platforms.
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 2006
Creativity support tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The... more Creativity support tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower users to be not only more productive but also more innovative. Potential users include software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, architects, educators, students, and many others. Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in hypothesis formation, speedier evaluation of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results. For creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (e.g., computer programs, scientific papers, engineering diagrams, symphonies, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking. This U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored workshop brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences, identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Two key outcomes emerged: (a) encouragement to evaluate creativity support tools through multidimensional in-depth longitudinal case studies and (b) formulation of 12 principles for design of creativity support tools. As Galileo struggled to view Jupiter through his newly built telescope, he adjusted the lenses and saw four twinkling points of light nearby. After recording their positions carefully, Galileo compared them to his drawings from previous nights. His conclusion that Jupiter had four moons circling it was a profound insight with far reaching implications.
Chi 03 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2003
A common observation when working on physically large displays, such as wall-sized projection, is... more A common observation when working on physically large displays, such as wall-sized projection, is that a certain amount of information privacy is lost. A common explanation for this loss in privacy is the higher legibility of information presented on large displays. In this paper, we present a novel paradigm for measuring whether or not a user has read certain content. We show that, even with constant visual angles and legibility, visitors are still more likely to glance over a user's shoulder to read information on a large wall-projected display than on a smaller traditional desktop monitor. We assert that, in addition to legibility, there are more subtle social factors that may contribute to the loss of privacy on physically large displays. Implementing hardware and software ideas for mitigating this loss of privacy remains future research.
Researchers have begun to explore tools that allow multiple users to collaborate across multiple ... more Researchers have begun to explore tools that allow multiple users to collaborate across multiple devices. One class of these tools allows users to simultaneously place and interact with information on shared displays. Unfortunately, there is a lack of good tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of these tools for information coordination in such scenarios. In this paper, we present collaborative jobshop scheduling, a task we have designed to evaluate systems and interactions within computer supported collaboration environments. We describe properties that make the task useful, as well as evaluation measures that can be used with this task. We validate the feasibility of the task and demonstrate analysis techniques in an experiment we conducted to compare the differences between presenting information serially versus simultaneously on a large shared display. Results from this experiment show the benefits of shared visual information when performing coordination tasks.
International Journal of Human Computer Studies, Apr 5, 2000
Communications of the Acm, May 1, 1999
As broad and varied as it may be, design influence still must maintain a user-centered perspective.
Human interaction proofs (HIPs) have become common place on the internet due to their effectivene... more Human interaction proofs (HIPs) have become common place on the internet due to their effectiveness in deterring automated abuse of online services intended for humans. However, there is a co-evolutionary arms race in progress and these proofs are becoming more difficult for genuine users while attackers are getting better at breaking existing HIPs. We studied various popular HIPs on the internet to understand their strength and human friendliness. To determine HIP strength, we adopted a direct approach of building computer attacks using image processing and machine learning techniques. To understand human-friendliness, a sequence of users studies were conducted to investigate HIP character recognition by humans under a variety of visual distortions and clutter commonly employed in reading-based HIPs. We found that many of the online HIPs are pure recognition tasks that can be easily broken using machine learning. The stronger HIPs tend to pose a combination of segmentation and recognition challenges. Further, the HIP user studies show that given correct segmentation, computers are much better at HIP character recognition than humans. In light of these results, we propose that segmentation-based reading challenges are the future for building stronger human-friendly HIPs. An example of such a segmentation-based HIP is presented with a preliminary assessment of its strength and human-friendliness.
Ieee Pacific Rim Conference on Multimedia, 2002
This paper presents Photo Table Of Contents (PhotoTOC), a system that helps users find digital ph... more This paper presents Photo Table Of Contents (PhotoTOC), a system that helps users find digital photographs in their own collection of photographs. PhotoTOC is a browsing user interface that uses an overview+detail design. The detail view is a temporally ordered list of all of the user's photographs. The overview of the user's collection is automatically generated by an image clustering algorithm, which clusters on the creation time and the color of the photographs. PhotoTOC was tested on users' own photographs against three other browsers. Searching for images with PhotoTOC was subjectively rated easier than all of the other browsers. This result shows that automatic organization of personal photographs facilitates efficient and satisfying search.
Uploads
Papers by Mary Czerwinski