Information Studies Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2780
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Item User Onboarding Design In Citizen Science: A Path To Grow Engagement And Participation.(2022) Cascaes Cardoso, Marina; Preece, Jennifer J; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the context of crowdsourcing communities (e.g., Citizen Science), crowd engagement is a significant determinant of projects' sustainability. The challenging missions of finding motivated people to participate in such initiatives and triggering their engagement to the cause have been widely acknowledged by scholars in the field of Citizen Science (Eveleigh et al., 2014; Nov et al., 2011b; Raddick et al., 2010; Rotman, 2013; Rotman et al., 2014); both on crowdsourcing initiatives (Balestra et al., 2017; Lampe et al., 2010; K. Y. Lin & Lu, 2011; Preece & Shneiderman, 2009; Steinmacher et al., 2015) and on online communities, in general (Brabham, 2010; Crowston & Fagnot, 2008; de Vreede et al., 2013; Zheng et al., 2011). The initial interaction with the technology employed by crowdsourcing platforms, including Citizen Science, affects users' experiences and should be designed considering their effects on the initial engagement. This work focuses on understanding how onboarding impacts early engagement and, consequently, the likelihood of boosting the quality of initial interaction and sustaining the adoption. Early engagement means the intricate process of embracing users' characteristics and motivations during the first interaction. The goal of Citizen Science platforms when implementing an onboarding design is, in general, to turn first-time visitors into a long-term users by scaffolding the first use toward participation. The central premise of this investigation is that onboarding characteristics and users' initial experiences largely determine whether they ultimately continue using the app; therefore, the thoughtful design of the first experience is fundamental. Organized in eight chapters, this doctoral dissertation starts by offering insights into the variables involved in the process of onboarding new users. Although commonly employed by the SaaS industry in various applications, onboarding design still lacks systematic investigation and precise definitions. Therefore, this research presents a terminology for the onboarding process and defines its four structural elements: Statement of Purpose, User Identification, Informational Support, and Conversion Event. Delving into the Citizen Science context, it is conducted three studies on how existing projects employ onboarding practices in their mobile applications. The studies, in chapters four to six, reveal barriers and reactions to onboarding experiences from volunteers. For example, making the statement of purpose clear, explicitly showing why individuals should be volunteering, and being part of a contributing crowd, apps have promising chances of keeping users engaged and returning in the future. Through various analyses and discussions, this work provides novel comprehension of how first-time interactions have the potential to alter newcomers' engagement in mobile apps. Finally, this investigation offers guidelines to support the designing decision process of creating a successful onboarding flow, primarily in the Citizen Science domain. It is presented seven drivers of newcomers' engagement that consist of design recommendations for onboarding that can be adopted for virtually any crowdsourcing app. Key drivers include essential concerns that influence engagement and can be resolved, for instance, by providing information on the users' roles and their contributions to the project, plus informing the app's goals and impact on the world with transparency. The seven drivers address cautious use of (1) technical language and jargon; to encourage (2) informing users regarding app's mechanics, and offering guidance to tasks accomplishments; stressing (3) the users' roles and their contributions' purpose within the project; to be transparent about the (4) app's goals, results, and impacts on the world; elucidate any (5) benefits or rewards right from the beginning, even they are not tangible or immediate; consider (6) UI's visual quality as a decisive interest factor and design it according to the intended audience; and lastly, (7) to advise the use of visual cues to enhance usability and reduce uncertainty. This dissertation has a pivotal contribution: the definition of terms and operationalization of onboarding elements, their attributes, and roles upon users' needs and individual aspects. Moreover, an onboarding flow creates an opportunity to successfully captivate and retain newcomers only when design and engagement attributes address users' characteristics, needs, and motivations.Item SIMULATING REALITY: TRAINING CITIZEN SCIENTISTS TO JUDGE STREAM HABITATS IN MULTISENSORY VIRTUAL REALITY(2019) Striner, Alina Goldman; Preece, Jennifer; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Citizen science is a form of crowdsourcing that allows volunteers to participate in scientific data collection and analysis. Many citizen scientists are engaged and motivated by science-based learning and discovery, but high training costs and limited resources often result in volunteers participating in unskilled work, leading to boredom and disengagement. Advances in immersive virtual reality (VR) have created opportunities to recreate physical environments with minimal cost, making it possible to train citizen scientists to make qualitative experiential judgments usually reserved for domain experts. This research trains citizen scientists to assess outdoor stream habitats using StreamBED VR, a multisensory VR training platform. This research offers the following contributions: 1. A study of how expert and novice water monitors make qualitative assessments of outdoor stream habitats using an EPA qualitative protocol. The research found that experts develop intuitive judgments of quality, use multisensory environmental information to make judgments, and construct past and future narratives of streams using environmental characteristics. 2. Iterative design of the Ambient Holodeck multisensory system, and a study of how ambient sensory information impacts observation skills. The research found that multisensory information increased the number of observations participants made, and positively affected engagement and immersion. 3. Iterative design of the StreamBED VR training platform, and two studies; the former explores how qualitative assessment skills can be taught in VR, and the latter considers how training in VR, with and without Multisensory cues, compares to a PowerPoint (PPT) baseline. Study results found although VR participants were more excited to continue training than PPT participants, Standard VR and PPT participants scored closest to an expert gold standard, performing significantly better than Multisensory VR participants. This research concludes that VR has the potential to train qualitative assessment tasks, but qualifies that training design is multifaceted and complex, full of theoretical learning considerations and practical challenges. Further, VR realism can be a powerful tool for training, but is only effective when training cues clearly parallel assessment tasks.Item Cooperative Design, Cooperative Science: Investigating Collaborative Research through Design with Floracaching(2015) Bowser, Anne Elizabeth; Preece, Jennifer; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents a case study of collaborative research through design with Floracaching, a gamified mobile application for citizen science biodiversity data collection. One contribution of this study is the articulation of collaborative research through design (CRtD), an approach that blends cooperative design approaches with the research through design methodology (RtD). Collaborative research through design is thus defined as an iterative process of cooperative design, where the collaborative vision of an ideal state is embedded in a design. Applying collaborative research through design with Floracaching illustrates how a number of cooperative techniques—especially contextual inquiry, prototyping, and focus groups—may be applied in a research through design setting. Four suggestions for collaborative research through design (recruit from a range of relevant backgrounds; take flexibility as a goal; enable independence and agency; and, choose techniques that support agreement or consensus) are offered to help others who wish to experiment with this new approach. Applying collaborative research through design to Floracaching yielded a new prototype of the application, accompanied by design annotations in the form of framing constructs for designing to support mobile, place-based citizen science activities. The prototype and framing constructs, which may inform other designers of similar citizen science technologies, are a second contribution of this research.