Guest blogger Jenny Neill attended last week's Psychster Labs and has this summary of Steven Poltrock's fascinating talk. Hear the recorded lecture here.

Steve Poltrock Ph.D., a now-retired Boeing researcher, studied human computer interaction (HCI) and online collaboration for many years. Joining us from Padua, Italy, Dr. Poltrock led us through his analysis of why adoption of video conferencing has been so slow.

A long history of false starts.

The idea that human beings could and would communicate using audio and video is an old idea. Some of the earliest prototypes, illustrations of attempts to move from imagination to implementation, date back more than 125 years. The path from idea to product has taken interesting turns, including the first bidirectional public video telephone service in Germany in 1936. The outbreak of World War II led to this system's demise in 1940. The high costs and reservation hassles involved with using AT&T's Picturephone meant these public videophone booths, available to Americans in the 1960s, met a similar fate to that of the German program. Companies in the U.S., Japan, France, and Sweden met with only limited success trying to sell videophones from the 1960s through the 1980s. Many concluded then that this technology was simply too expensive to gain traction in the communication marketplace.

Early on, technical challenges played a role, but they were overcome so thoroughly that competing platforms and digital rights management emerged as another drag on adoption. Today, most computers, tablets, or smartphones have the capability of sending audio and video, but there are over 30 video and audio codecs resulting in many competing technologies for transmitting, encoding, encrypting, and streaming images and sound.

Finally, Dr. Poltrock shared market research showing that people like and want to use video conferencing. There seem to be clear uses cases spanning both business and family settings. And, clinical and occupational studies are finding scenarios for which video increases trust, intimacy, and productivity when compared to audio alone.

So, why in the 85 years since the technology debuted, only 19% of those who can use audio-visual communication actually do? One would be hard pressed to find a slower adoption curve in all of tech.

Dr. Poltrock hypothesized that the answer is in our psychology. Effects of the physical environment; mutual gaze, trust, and other emotions; and the importance of context were among the research areas Dr. Poltrock reviewed in the webinar.

The camera is easy. It's the "studio" that's hard.

Setting up cameras, monitors, and microphones in a conference room present numerous potential barriers to conducting meetings. The screen tends to dominate attendee attention instead of the meeting leader. The person closest to the microphone may be perceived by remote viewers as shouting. Those sitting in closest proximity to the camera appear larger than those farther away. Some companies have attempted to create systems that address these issues with the physical meeting environment. Though the expected return-on-investment would seem to make such costly systems worth considering for many global companies, adoption remains low.

We still don't have eye contact.

Using video as a communication tool is still interpreted, in most scenarios, as awkward or contrived. Looking at someone else on a screen approximates face-to-face contact. Yet, it is the fact that video conferencing is simply an imitation of more natural human interaction that seems to be the problem. Two studies described in this webinar stood out to me as very telling about why this is true. The first identified gaze disparity based on camera positioning as a persistent challenge. The other tested how a confederate was framed for on screen viewing to see if it affected the development of empathy.

Gaze disparity has a definite impact on forming trust over a video transmission. A study reported on by Milton Chen in 2002 established that when the camera is more than 8° above or is at any angle below the eye of the person being viewed, the viewer does not perceive eye contact. Perhaps even worse for most equipment scenarios, when the camera was aimed up from below, the viewer's perception was that the person being viewed was looking above their head. Chen's findings suggest an optimum positioning for video cameras that is difficult to maintain in many physical setups. For example, imagine using your smartphone to have a video call. How hard would it be for you to keep the phone positioned such that it was slightly above your eye level and pointed down? My arm and wrist are getting tired just thinking about it!

Other researchers have experimented with how the face is framed as seen by a viewer and how this may relate to developing empathy in video communications. In one such experiment, Nguyen and Canny used a confederate to test whether or not empathy developed for a colleague. Participants met with the confederate in one of three conditions: face-to-face, online video with head only framing, and online video with upper body framing. The confederate then dropped pens in proximity to the participant and the researchers tracked how many helped pick up the pens and how long it took before offering to help. Participants were almost as likely to pick up pens dropped by the Upper Body confederate as they were for the Face-to-Face confederate. For Head Only confederates, the average lag time before participants helped was more than double that for the Face-to-Face confederate. Good thing that fictional character Max Headroom didn't need to establish empathy with viewers to report the news!

Will adoption rates for using video in communications accelerate?

Many researchers continue to investigate whether people are more likely to use video conferencing in business or home contexts. Some of the same issues that seem to prevent adoption of video in office settings are just as problematic for families. Some posited that use of video-capable devices or video conferencing will take off with the Millennial generation. Teens do tend to be more willing to use it with their peers. Yet, not being able to easily and reliably perceive eye contact through video seems to be its most significant limitation. In the discussion that followed, he elaborated on this explaining that these small but powerful psychological determinants will need to be overcome. When asked directly if the market demand for today's video conferencing technologies will accelerate, Dr. Poltrock's reply was a simple, "No."

For further reading

1. Wikipedia's videotelephony page contains more about the history of technologies used to transmit bidirectional audio and video and includes links to additional references for further reading on this topic.
2. For more about market penetration rates, see Theirer, A., & Eskelsen, G. (2008). Media metrics: The true state of the modern media marketplace. The Progress and Freedom Foundation. In the presentation, Dr. Poltrock added information from this Pew Internet study about video calling and video chat to a chart from the Media Metrics study by the Progress and Freedom Foundation to visually depict just how far behind video conference technologies are in comparison to other household technologies.
3. Download the PDF, Leveraging the Asymmetric Sensitivity of Eye Contact for Videoconferencing, to read a complete report of Milton Chen's 2002 research.
4. Purchase the PDF, More than Face-to-Face: Empathy Effects of Video Framing, to read David Nguyen and John Canny's full 2009 report.

About the presenter

Steve Poltrock recently retired from The Boeing Company with 40 years of experience in research and advanced development at the interface of humans and technology. He has degrees in engineering and mathematics and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Washington. His research focus is in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and he chaired the ACM Conference on CSCW in 2012. He has published more than 60 papers in the CSCW field about topics such as collaborative user interface design, innovative collaboration technology, collaborative hypermedia, and experiences deploying groupware and video conferencing systems.

About the writer

Jenny Neill has nearly 20 years of experience applying research skills to content and application design problems. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the College of Wooster and a Certificate in Software Product Management from the University of Washington. She has worked at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute at the University of Washington, and the internet's first legitimate online pharmacy. She focuses on information security and privacy, compliance, cloud computing, and online social marketing in her consulting practice.

Robert Wilson led an enjoyable discussion of what he learned from the 400+ psychology articles published to date about Facebook.

Hear the recorded lecture here.

View the slides here.

Robert Wilson is the lead author on a paper titled "A Review of Facebook Research in the Social Sciences" which was recently published by APS and Sage. He hails from Austin Texas, home of his co-authors Sam Gosling and Lindsay Graham, but he's now in graduate school at the Washington University in St. Louis. The paper has enjoyed a positive reception as far away as Scotland, Tanzania, and Argentina, as well as from leading experts in online social sciences here at home, including danah boyd and Cameron Marlowe of Facebook itself.

The studies tend to cluster into groups that address 5 main questions:

1. Who is using Facebook and what are users doing while on Facebook?
2. Why do people use Facebook?
3. How are people presenting themselves on Facebook?
4. How is Facebook affecting relationships among groups and individuals?
5. Why are people disclosing personal information on Facebook despite potential risks?

Psychster welcomes guest blogger Brandon Milner, veteran UI designer from RealNetworks and Xbox, for a discussion of privacy versus the benefits of membership.

Privacy: How we want to share everything, and nothing at the same time.

Privacy concerns are making unprecedented news headlines. Online privacy used be as simple as making sure your credit card information didn't get stolen or merely keeping your email address out of the hands of dubious pill peddling spambots. With the introduction of social networking and always-on computers that fit in our pocket, not only are the issues changing, but how end-users react to them is changing too.

The main contradiction is that people want their personal information out there, but they are nervous and scared about what that might mean. They want the world to know who they are. They want websites to react to them as real human beings, with content that is exciting, personal and relevant. But on the other hand, they are afraid, overwhelmed and confused. I'll break it down into two major categories: What people want from sharing their info, and what they do not want. As some of these points overlap, you'll see where the anxiety sets in.

What People Want:

1.Ease of sharing with trusted people: This is the emotional hook that draws people together on social networking sites in the first place. Everyone wants to share pictures, ideas, and links with the people in their life that they trust. For it to work, the barrier to sharing has to be as low and frictionless as possible. For example, you might want your friends to know you're currently alone downtown in a coffee shop and would love someone to pop in and say hello. You want people to read your poems, hear your tearful ranting status updates, and offer advice on where to go for BBQ on a Thursday night.

Many people are now totally addicted to the feedback loop that social networking sites provide. They look forward to the "likes" when they post a picture and to camaraderie when they tweet that their partner is making them watch reality TV, again. They get frustrated when friends don't read their updates or when tweets for advice go unanswered.

2.A customized user experience: When I search for something, it's nice that my search engine knows a little bit about me already. When I look up a new restaurant downtown, it's great to know that my friend Bob just went there and recommends the apple pie. Or, when I'm looking for the Hideout, it knows that I'm in Seattle, near downtown and therefore sends me to the tiny chandelier-adorned bar on Madison, instead of the identically named nightclub in Chicago. If you go to a music website like Rdio, it is reassuring that your friend Kevin (who has the best taste in music) says he likes the band "Gum in my Hair" and that they have a show this Friday, right near you. Want to find something to read? Your friends are already amusing themselves by clicking on tawdry articles in the Washington Post Social reader.

On the other hand, there is What People Do Not Want:

1.Censoring themselves: While it's generally accepted that you shouldn't post anything online you wouldn't want seen by the entire world, that isn't how people want to use the Internet. Indeed it isn't how they actually use it. We've all heard tales of how a Facebook slip up accidentally ruined a faked sick day. Clearly, the desire to share, can overwhelm common sense discretion.

If people do post things in public, it is frustrating to have to water things down. For myself, the vast majority of my posts are private, and whenI do make a few posts public, I assure you that they are the most non-revealing, milquetoast, mundane things I ever say. I'm concerned that if I say something remotely controversial, I'll offend someone and won't get that bank loan or that job offer.

2.Complicated privacy settings: It's estimated that 1 in 4 Facebook users have no idea how Facebook's privacy controls even work. Some estimate that number to be much higher. Carefully navigating the complexities of making Friends Lists, Google+ Circles, or adjusting privacy settings is hard, and confusing.

I guarantee that no matter how tech savvy you are, you don't know how privacy settings on Facebook really work. Here's proof: Did you know that if you tag a friend in a photo, all of their friends can suddenly SEE that photo in your otherwise private photo album? Yep, if you mark a photo "friends only" and then tag a friend in it, your setting gets magically trumped by Facebook's desire to share that image and suddenly that tagged friend's mom, or coworker (which might be your coworker) can now see your private image. I was shocked. And judging by how many embarrassing photos I see tagged of friends, I bet they would shocked too. Equally befuddling, at least as I write this, there is no preference to turn that "feature" off .

3.They don't trust corporations: A lot of the fury over privacy laws centers around fears of the nefarious companies we give our information to. Facebook has lawyer-honed fine print in their privacy policies describing their right to use your shared content for promotional purposes. It's also very suspicious when you visit a website for the first time and it greets you by name and recommends content it seems to have magically selected just for you. Google, for its part, seems to track everything you've ever searched for. Why? "To improve your user experience" they say. In Google's case, they want to show you targeted advertising, and give you more personalized search results.

Clearly, some of the use cases people are clamoring for are empowered by this collection of data, but that leap isn't clear to people. Worse, companies over-collect information in hopes of later introducing new functionality. Everybody knows companies have one goal - to make a profit - and if the service is free (Google, Linked In, Facebook, Twitter...everyone), then they must make money off of user content. It's easy to understand how a user would get spooked by what that might mean.

4.They don't trust other people: For every 99 people someone is OK with sharing content with, there is ONE person with whom they are not - and that person makes all the difference. Most people don't care if folks know they went out to a show on Friday and partied a little too hard, but they mind if their boss knows. They might feel comfortable telling the world they met a cute guy this weekend... but not if their dad found that out. Or their ex boyfriend. (or current boyfriend?). The net is chock full of stories of the wrong person getting a hold of private information and using it to do bad things. 1 in 9 people have reported being stalked, or otherwise harassed online.

5.They don't trust the government: Laws like SOPA and PIPA ran afoul of Silicon Valley because it put huge liabilities on companies to monitor the usage of websites. Suddenly, a website or ISP became accountable if any of the content on the site was copyrighted. The government was suddenly taking a much more proactive role in monitoring what was going on online and millions of bittorrent user and YouTube content creators sensed that the government was coming for them. First, perhaps only for content violators, but perhaps soon, emboldened by new access to private information, coming for those who posted things that were in any way incriminating. People imagined their digital files at the CIA swelling with personal data.

So What Does it All Mean?

Users can't entirely have it both ways. That is, one can't avoid sharing any personal data and expect to take part in the new personalized targeted ads and web content available on many websites. Companies are going to have to figure out how to walk the line between giving users the tailor-made customized experiences they crave, without appearing to be nefarious and invasive. Even the government is stepping in to offer guidelines for how personal information can be collected and used.

Users, for their part are going to have to find their own balance between what they are comfortable sharing and what needs to stay offline. They should educate themselves about how privacy settings work, on the Internet, and in their phone's mobile applications. Some will opt to share less, and those use cases need to be accounted for as well. Google's new Chrome Browser will have features allowing users to "not be tracked" at all for those users that want a degree of anonymity when they surf at the expense of a customized experience. Once that data is out there, it is nearly impossible to magically reel it all back in. For the Internet, and the new shared user experience, there is no easy way back.

When users are entertained by online content, do they respond to display ads more positively than when they are informed, educated, or engaged by publishers in other ways? And does the entertainment value of a site's content always confer positive impressions to the brands advertised on it? Psychster put these notions to the test in a series of studies conducted for our client Bookrags.com (a site devoted to providing study guides, lesson plans, and educational resources to students and teachers). Read our full whitepaper of these studies here (1MB).

We first assessed the perceptions of online ad buyers, and confirmed that they believe that users of entertainment sites show better responses to ads, higher purchase intent, and better brand retention than do users of other sites. These beliefs were mirrored by the fact that reported ad spend on entertainment sites was about 6 times greater than spend on education sites. In a subsequent study, we showed a sample of college students the ads of 3 different brands (for a bank, soft drink, and computer company) on 2 different types of sites, both of which target college students, but which differ in their goal of providing entertainment versus educational resources. 

Key findings:

● We found no experimental evidence for the hypothesis that brands are perceived more positively when their display ads appear on entertainment sites rather than on education sites. 

● In fact, the bank that was displayed in the ads was perceived as less classy, cool, modern, and honest when its ads appeared on entertainment sites compared to education sites. 

● The same pattern was found for intent to engage with the ads: there was no evidence for the superiority of the entertainment sites, and the bank ads were more likely to be clicked when appearing on the education sites.

● Neither the entertainment nor the education sites produced significantly better brand recall.

         Click here to download PDF file of image (1MB)

These results suggest that, contrary to widespread beliefs among ad buyers, sites whose goal is to entertain do not carry a universal advantage as an advertising platform over sites whose goal is to inform, educate, or meet users' needs in other ways. In fact, users of other sites may be more inclined toward acquiring goods or services by virtue of the site's content, and all the more so when relevant ads are displayed. For complete details of the study, read the full whitepaper here (1MB).

Students in the Fall 2011 COM 597 course on usability testing enjoyed a hands-on experience as they completed an end-to-end usability test for one of several companies in the Puget Sound area. With the help of the MCDM network, Lecturer David Evans, Ph.D. recruited the organizations who ranged from start-ups, to global non-profits, to enterprise ventures. Each organization was assigned 2 student analysts, who developed and ran a usability testing protocol to identify how the organizations could better align their interfaces with their users' needs.

"What we were aiming for was a win-win-win," says Dr. Evans, whose firm Psychster Inc. has been conducting usability research since 2006. "Organizations received inexpensive research insights, students gained a portfolio-quality experience, and the MCDM deepened its relationship with the technology community."