talk about "User Engagement in the Digital World"
It will take place at CWI, room L015 from 15h30 to 16h30.
Attendance is free, however, we would appreciate if you register by email. Myriam.Traub@cwi.nl.
User Engagement in the Digital World
Mounia Lalmas
Yahoo! Labs, Barcelona
In the online world, user engagement refers to the quality of the userexperience that emphasizes the positive aspects of the interaction with a web application and, in particular, the phenomena associated with wanting to use that application longer and frequently. This definition is motivated by the observation that successful web applications are not just used, but they are engaged with. Users invest time, attention, and emotion into them.
User engagement is measured in many ways, through methods of self-reporting (e.g., questionnaires), observer methods (e.g., facial expression analysis, speech analysis, desktop actions, etc.), neuro-physiological signal processing methods (e.g., respiratory and cardiovascular accelerations and decelerations, muscle spasms, etc.), and from a web analytics perspective (through online behavior metrics that assess users’ depth of engagement with a site). These methods represent various tradeoffs between scale of data and depth of understanding (for instance, surveys are small-scale but deep, whereas clicks are large-scale but shallow in understanding). Little work has been done to integrate these various measures into a coherent understanding of engagement success. We address this problem by combining techniques from web analytics and mining, information retrieval evaluation, and existing works on user engagement coming from the domains of information science, multimodal human computer interaction and cognitive psychology. In this way, we can combine insights from big data with deep analysis of human behavior in the lab or through crowd-sourcing experiment.
This talk comprises three "inter-woven" parts: (1) definition of user engagement and its many characteristics. (2) data-driven approaches looking at user engagement through the development of models that allow for a better representation of how users engage within and across different digital services. (3) how studying affect and cognition is providing additional insights into measuring user engagement.
This work was done in collaboration with Ioannis Arapakis, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Georges Dupret, Janette Lehmann, Lori McCay-Peet, Vidhya Navalpakkam, David Warnock and Elad Yom-Tov.
Bio
Mounia Lalmas joined Yahoo! Labs in January 2011, as a visiting principal scientist. Prior to this, she held a Microsoft Research/RAEng Research Chair at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. Before that, she was Professor of Information Retrieval at the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London, which she joined in 1999 as a lecturer (aka assistant professor). From 2002 until 2007, she co-led the Evaluation Initiative for XML Retrieval (INEX), a large-scale project with over 80 participating organisations worldwide, which was responsible for defining the nature of XML retrieval, and how it should be evaluated. While at Glasgow, she has been working on applying quantum theory to model information retrieval. She also worked on result presentation and evaluation for aggregated search, and technologies for bridging the digital divide. Her new research agenda combines expertise in information retrieval evaluation and information science to develop models of user engagements and associated user engagement metrics.
