Write Michael Toomim: toomim@cs.washington.edu for more information.
Looking for an interested undergrad!
This summer, Prof. James Landay’s group is working on a new way to measure the value of user interfaces and websites — the amount of money it takes to make people stop using them.
Which website is more valuable to people: Facebook or Google search? As yet, no one knows how to measure this. But we think we can, by combining methods from:
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Economics
* DNS hacking
• Mechanical Turk and crowdsourcing
This could be the future of A/B tests, user studies, and internet economics. For the last decade, websites have become obsessed with their statistics of hits, click-through rates, and their number of users, but how much value do they add to human lives?
Let’s give silicon valley a way to look at the big questions.
The researcher can earn credits, as well as be paid (at a higher rate than mechanical turkers!).
Here’s another one!
Prof. Landay’s group is also creating a new type of social space — something a little like email, and a little like Facebook. We are taking aspects of socializing in real life (eye contact, body language, vocal expressiveness, standing near someone) and finding ways to represent them online, to make the internet suck less for socializing.
This is both a research project, and a real, live system, that you will be able to help design and contribute to.
Let’s work together to make the internet suck less for socializing.
Write toomim@cs.washington.edu for more information.