Social Media and Human Factors Research

Today, Erica Naone posted “How Distracting are Social Media Tools?” at the Technology Review Editors Blog regarding a presentation she attended this week at CHI 2009.  The presentation discussed the paper “Remembrance of Things Tagged: How Tagging Effort Affects Tag Production and Human Memory,” which was authored by Raluca Budiu, Peter Pirolli, and Lichan Hong.

The authors investigated “… how different techniques for producing tags to Web content affect individual tag production and individual memory” (p. 615).  Specifically, they had 27 participants read 18 randomly selected passages (ranging in length from 253 to 279 words), perform one of three actions (no-tag, Click2Tag, or Type-to-tag) for each one, and complete recall and recognition tasks during three study-recall blocks.  The “…results suggest that (a) Click2Tag increases tagging rates, (b) Click2Tag improves recognition of facts from the tagged text when compared to type-to-tag, and (c) Click2Tag is comparable to the no-tagging baseline condition on recall measures. Results suggest that tagging by clicking strengthens the memory traces by repeated readings of relevant words in the text and, thus, improves recognition” (p. 615).

I thought Ms. Naone brought up two important points in her post:

• “However, it’s important to keep looking for ways to make social media less time consuming.”
• “For social media to truly work for us, we need to enhance what it does right and reduce what it does wrong.”

Given the pervasiveness of social media, ongoing human factors research is needed to adequately address this rapidly expanding and changing area to ensure that best practices are incorporated in future designs to meet the needs of users.