I'm Patrick Dubois and I'll be presenting our paper titled
Towards More Gender-Inclusive Q&As:
Investigating Perceptions of Additional Community Presence Information.
This is work that I completed as part of my PhD.
Online question and answer communities, or Q&As, have become important knowledge
repositories that graphic designers use to share software knowledge.
There are several advantages for those who contribute their knowledge to Q&As,
such as Q&As providing platforms for graphic designers to build galleries or
portfolios that they can then share with others.
They also provide informal networking
opportunities that graphic designers can use to get to know their peers.
And finally, it simply feels good for graphic designers
to know that the knowledge they're contributing is helping others learn.
And so despite the relative gender balance in the field of graphic design,
graphic design Q&As do not reflect this reality.
Most contributors are men and community features appear to support men better than others.
So therefore the advantages I just described,
which do have real impacts beyond Q&As, benefit men the most.
There are also consequences to the quality of the content being contributed.
For example, the content is tailored to the interests of the majority group, in our case, men.
So we know there are gender balance issues in graphic design Q&As,
is there anything we, as HCI researchers, can do about it?
If we look at prior work, we see that adding community presence
information to Q&As could be a potential approach to build equitable communities.
Specifically, we investigate if social presence and awareness, and homophily,
can help promote building good communities.
Social presence and awareness is defined as "the reciprocal awareness of others of
an individual and the individual's awareness of others within an interactive social space."
So to put simply, it's being aware of who else
is in the room and knowing what activities those people are doing.
Homophily is defined as "the phenomenon describing
a person's preference to interact with other, similar individuals."
And so this is the reason we have icebreaker activities: to get to know one another,
find things in common, and hopefully build stronger relationships.
And so, based on these two concepts,
we developed interfaces with additional community presence information.
Under each question of our Q&A, we show viewers of those questions.
Specifically, we show viewers that share something in common with the user.
But we wanted to see just how detailed or specific this information had to be to have an impact,
and so we tried different scopes of information instantiated as two different interfaces.
In one interface, we aggregate all the information into demographics that the user can see.
So the user sees the different characteristics,
and then the percentages of viewers who share those characteristics.
In the other interface, the user sees individual viewers under each question.
And again, those viewers have been selected because
they share something in common with the user.
So to investigate how people perceive this community presence information,
we conducted a 10-day task-based field study.
We recruited 30 graphic designers: 14 men, 14 women, and two non-binary participants.
Each participant used one of the Community Presence interfaces and as a comparison point,
also used a Baseline interface that does not have any of this additional information.
The participants used each of their assigned interfaces for five days,
completed a questionnaire after each interface, and were interviewed at the end of the study.
So I'll be presenting a summary of our most important findings.
In all our discussions with participants,
participants described the idea of Q&As being humanized.
In other words, because of the characteristics being shown,
participants thought the other users felt more like real people.
On the other hand, on the Baseline, they felt that without this information users felt like robots.
But participants had mixed feelings on whether or not this was a good thing.
Among those who thought positively about humanizing Q&As, they said they
had greater feelings of empathy for other users.
So as this participant says:
"I would do research for people. Without the information, I would just put a Google it."
Among the participants who felt negatively about humanizing Q&As,
they felt like it was shifting the focus from the content to the community members.
And so these participants go to Q&As with a specific task in mind,
either to ask or answer questions, share knowledge,
etc., but they felt like this information distracted them from these tasks.
And so as this participant says: "I'm just using Q&As to help teach."
Other participants used words such as "Q&As are not social networking
sites," or "we're not here to make friendships."
And so according to these participants, this information simply does not belong on Q&As.
Participants also talked about the information
promoting a sense of inclusion and promoting privacy awareness.
We had hoped to see participants display feelings
of homophily based on our interfaces and we did see that from most participants.
They described the characteristics as helping them feel like they
belong because they could see other users sharing something in common.
However, women also described impacts of heterophily.
Heterophily is the idea that people like interacting with others that have differences.
And so these women liked seeing diversity of users using the Q&As.
And because you can see that we're all unique but also part of this community,
it's also promoting a sense of inclusion.
And so as this participant says: "it's important to feel like I'm in a global melting pot.
People have different qualities of life around the world as well."
And finally, participants described having an increased awareness of privacy considerations.
Because they could see the information that other users were sharing, they
assumed correctly that they themselves were also sharing this information.
However, participants hesitated at times to view questions because they
were not quite ready yet to share that information with the wider community.
And so as this participant says: "I was more conscious about the
characteristics that I was publicly sharing."
And so despite the mixed reactions from our participants, we do see potential
in using community presence information in promoting an inclusive environment.
Through leveraging people's sense of social presence and awareness,
empathy, and homophily, we also improve sense of community and make people feel more welcome.
For example, prior work suggests that collaboration is something
that appeals to women in particular, and that can be encouraged by helping
contributors empathize with those needing help.
We also see the potential of combining the effects of homophily and heterophily, for example, showing
to viewers that some people share something in common with them and so they belong in that way,
but also that we're all unique and we can also belong in the same community and work together.
And finally, it would be interesting to see the effects of a long-term deployment of the community
presence information, to see how communities take shape over time, how community norms evolve,
and how behaviours can change, hopefully all towards making the communities more inclusive.
So to summarize, we contributed two interface designs that display
community presence information within a Q&A.
And show how community presence information
can potentially be used to work towards gender inclusive Q&As.
Thanks for watching.