The effect of audience design on labeling, organizing, and finding shared files Authors: Emilee Rader Keywords: audience design, common ground, file labeling and organizing, group information management
Abstract:
In an online experiment, I apply theory from psychology and communications to find out whether group information management tasks are governed by the same communication processes as conversation. This paper describes results that replicate previous research, and expand our knowledge about audience design and packaging for future reuse when communication is mediated by a co-constructed artifact like a file-and-folder hierarchy. Results indicate that it is easier for information consumers to search for files in hierarchies created by information producers who imagine their intended audience to be someone similar to them, independent of whether the producer and consumer actually share common ground. This research helps us better understand packaging choices made by information producers, and the direct implications of those choices for other users of group information systems.
Examples from the paper:
- A scientist needs to locate procedures and results from an experiment conducted by another researcher in his lab.
- A student learning the open-source, command-line statistical computing environment R needs to find out how to calculate the mode of her dataset.
- A new member of a design team needs to review requirements analysis activities that took place before he joined the team.
- An intelligence analyst needs to consult information collected by other agencies to assess a potential threat.
Do any of those sound familiar?
Unexpected result:
In general, Consumers performed best (fewest clicks to find the target file) when the Producer created a hierarchy for an Imagined Audience from the same community, regardless of the community the Consumer community. Consumers had the most difficulty when searching in hierarchies created by a Producer for a dissimilar Imagined Audience.
In other words, imagining an audience is a bad strategy. Create a hierarchy that works for you. (And with a topic map you could let others create hierarchies that work for them.)
(Apologies for the length of this post but unexpected interface results merit the space.)
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