New Jersey Institute of Technology Digital Commons @ NJIT Dissertations Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fall 2017 A conversation centric approach to understanding and supporting the coordination of social group-activities Richard P. Schuler New Jersey Institute of Technology Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.njit.edu/dissertations Part of the Databases and Information Systems Commons, and the Management Information Systems Commons Recommended Citation Schuler, Richard P., "A conversation centric approach to understanding and supporting the coordination of social group-activities" (2017). Dissertations. 47. https://digitalcommons.njit.edu/dissertations/47 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at Digital Commons @ NJIT. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ NJIT. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Copyright Warning & Restrictions The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” If a, user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of “fair use” that user may be liable for copyright infringement, This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. Please Note: The author retains the copyright while the New Jersey Institute of Technology reserves the right to distribute this thesis or dissertation Printing note: If you do not wish to print this page, then select “Pages from: first page # to: last page #” on the print dialog screen The Van Houten library has removed some of the personal information and all signatures from the approval page and biographical sketches of theses and dissertations in order to protect the identity of NJIT graduates and faculty. ABSTRACT A CONVERSATION CENTRIC APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING AND SUPPORTING THE COORDINATION OF SOCIAL GROUP-ACTIVITIES by Richard P. Schuler III Despite the widespread and large variety of communication tools available to us such as, text messaging, Skype, email, twitter, Facebook, instant messaging, GroupMe, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc., many people still routinely find coordinating activities with our friends to be a very frustrating experience. Everyone, has at least once, encountered the difficulties involved with deciding what to do as a group. Some friends may be busy, others may have already seen the movie that the others want to see, and some do not like Mexican food. It is a challenge everyone has faced and continue to face. This is a result of system designers and researchers primarily focusing on understanding and supporting workplace coordination. This workplace bias has led to an assumption that the same technologies employed to facilitate workplace coordination can easily transfer to social coordination. This has created a divergence between how people actually communicate and coordinate for social reasons versus how the systems and technologies developed to support such coordination and communication are designed. As a result, researchers and designers are faced with dearth of knowledge about how to design and research systems that support people engaging in coordination and communication for more social reasons. This dissertation moves beyond previous work, both academic and commercial, which has either focused on providing structured and process oriented communication and coordination support or on the creation of yet another text chat. This research focuses on a narrower aspect of social communication and coordination, specifically, the problem of social group-activity coordination. Generally, this is the stuff people do to coordinate going out to dinner or the movies with a group of friends. This area has been under researched and as personal experience informs, poorly supported. This dissertation contains four main contributions. First, a diary study of 37 young adults aged 18 to 28 investigated the current social group-activity coordination practices resulting in an expansion of the knowledge about how social groups coordinate social group-activities and what technologies people use and why. Second, via iterative design and testing following a research through design methodology the design space for social group-activity coordination is explored over multiple design iterations. This results in the design and instantiation of a social group-activity coordination support tool improving understanding of the design requirements of tools that support social group-activity coordination. Third, a quantitative survey which confirmed many of the findings discovered during the dairy study. Fourth, the tool is evaluated in a laboratory study with 84 participants during 21 sessions. This study finds that using the conversation centric design perspective presented in this dissertation it is possible to reduce information overload and support consensus building. Also, the features provided are overwhelmingly desired with 91.4% of the participants desiring the ability and interface to make suggestions about important activity details (vs open chat) and two-thirds of the participants reporting they would prefer to use this tool over text messaging. The combination of all these different investigations into social group-activity coordination extends the knowledge about how to improve the support of social group- activity coordination and move beyond the process and systems oriented perspectives and towards conversation centric designs. A CONVERSATION CENTRIC APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING AND SUPPORTING THE COORDINATION OF SOCIAL GROUP-ACTIVITIES by Richard P. Schuler III Advisor: Dr. Quentin Jones A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of New Jersey Institute of Technology in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Human Centered Computing Department of Information Systems December 2017 Copyright © 2017 by Richard P. Schuler III ALL RIGHTS RESERVED APPROVAL PAGE A CONVERSATION CENTRIC APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING AND SUPPORTING THE COORDINATION OF SOCIAL GROUP-ACTIVITIES Richard P. Schuler III Dr. Quentin Jones, Dissertation Advisor Date Associate Professor of Information Systems, NJIT Dr. Cristian Borcea, Committee Member Date Professor and Chair of Computer Science, NJIT Dr. Michael Ehrlich, Committee Member Date Associate Professor School of Management, NJIT Dr. Jodi Forlizzi, Committee Member Date Professor of Human Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University Dr. Katia Passerini, Committee Member Date Professor of Computer Science, St. Johns University BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Author: Richard Paul Schuler III Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Date: December 2017 Undergraduate and Graduate Education: • Doctor of Philosophy in Information Systems New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, 2017 • Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, 2008 Major: Information Systems Presentations and Publications: Schuler, R.P., Grandhi, S.A., Mayer, J.M., Ricken, S.T., Jones, Q. “The doing of doing stuff: Understanding the coordination of social group-activities”, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2014, pp. 119-128. Mayer, J.M., Schuler, R.P., Jones, Q. “Towards an understanding of social inference opportunities in social computing”, Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Support Group Work, 2012, pp. 239-248. Grandhi, S.A., Schuler, R.P., Jones, Q. “Telling calls: Facilitating mobile phone conversation grounding and management”, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2011, pp. 2153-2162. Mayer, J.M., Motahari, S., Schuler, R.P., Jones, Q. “Common attributes in an unusual context: Predicting the desirability of a social match”, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 2010, pp. 337-340. Grandhi, S.A., Schuler, R.P., Jones, Q. “Telling calls: Making informed call handling decisions”, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, 2010, pp. 43-46. Ricken, S.T., Schuler, R.P., Grandhi, S.A., Jones, Q. “TellUsWho: Guided social network data collection”, Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Science, 2010. iv Patel, K., Ismail, M., Motahari, S., Rosenbaum, D.J., Ricken, S.T., Grandhi, S.A., Schuler, R.P., Jones, Q. “MarkIt: Community play and computation to generate rich location descriptions through a mobile phone game”, Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2010. Grandhi, S.A., Schuler, R.P., Jones, Q. “To answer or not to answer: That is the question for cell phone users”, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2009, pp. 4621-4626. Motahari, S., Ziavras, S., Schuler, R.P., Jones, Q. “Identity inference as a privacy risk in computer-mediated communication”, Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2009. Schuler, R.P., Laws, N., Bajaj, S., Grandhi, S.A., Jones, Q. “Finding your way with CampusWiki: A location-aware wiki”,