Fiches de cours 2018-2019

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Quantification of user experience

DH-402

Enseignant(s) :

Boullier Dominique Georges Léon

Langue:

English

Summary

The course will deliver all the conceptual and technical resources required for managing a user-centered design process that depends more and more on sophisticated quantification methods.

Content

User experience is the target and the resource of the digital economy: provide new valuable experience, get the feedback from traces and tests, trigger the contribution from online communities and reinvent the product, the service, the content. Digital Humanities provide new attractive user experiences. They also design the sensors, the traces, the tests, the metrics and the concepts for understanding user's behavior. The course will deliver all the conceptual and technical resources required for managing a user-centered design process that depends more and more on sophisticated quantification methods.

 

1/ Cognitive and semiotics dimensions of UX (sessions 1 and 2)

a/ Perception, memory and attention

• Perception: salience, features
• Gestalt theory
• Learning processes
• Problem solving and decision theories
• Distributed cognition approaches (Suchman, Hutchins)
• Human-Machine Interaction theories and methods
• Attention economy

b/ Semiotics

• Index, symbol, sign (Peirce)
• Structural semiotics (Greimas) and narratology
• Graphic semiology (Bertin)
• Data viz issues and concepts: tables, timelines, maps, and dashboards

 

2/ Design methods (sessions 3 and 4)

a/ User modelling (from Eco to Norman)

• Differentiate (and combine) interface design, interaction design, information design

b/ User-centered design: quantification and feedback data in the loop

• Testing methodologies: protocols and principles of validation

 

3/ Quantification and feedback of UX (sessions 5, 6 and 7)

a/ Big Data in quantification history:

• Statistics, surveys, polls and social listening. (Desrosières)
• Propagation and memetic's metrics (Kleinberg, Leskovec)

b/ Audience theories, design and methods

• Media theory (McLuhan)
• The phantom public (Lippmann)
• Two-step flow (Katz Lazarsfeld) and influence
• From panels and focus groups to social listening

c/ Psychometrics and tests

• Natively digital traces, online/offline and mixed methods (consumer journeys).
• Individual testing of cognitive activity: eye-tracking and other body sensors
• Mechanical Turk methods for testing
• UX modelling: Subjective assessment

 

4/ History of cognitive technologies and innovations (sessions 8 and 9)

a/ Historical landmarks in cognitive technologies

• Writing (Goody)
• Printing (Eisenstein)
• Perspective (Panofsky and Alpers)

b/ History and sociology of innovations (related to content industry and UX)

• Telecoms, computer interfaces, internet, photography, music. Technical evolution and business models

 

5/ Cultural differences in user experience (sessions 10 and 11)

a/ A primer on anthropology and theories of representation

• Four ontologies (Descola)
• Translation: linguistic and cultural stakes and theories
• Digital experience around the world: the phone as the universal device or not?
• Culturonomics (Manovich)

b/ Sociotechnical analysis of innovations and appropriation processes

• Theory of diffusion (Rogers)
• Appropriation and reinvention: case studies and strategies
• Generation gap: learning by immersion, imitation and training, primer and secondary socialization processes.

 

6/ Collective engagement in UX (sessions 12 and 13)

a/ Principles

• Contributions, exchanges and crowdsourcing as part of UX: comments, annotations, controversies (Boyd)
• Wikipedia's political and cognitive processes (Cardon)
• Distributed architectures at technical and cultural levels (Musiani)

b/ Methods

• Digital Methods (Rogers and Marres)
• Community management:  theory and techniques
• Social Network Analysis: from reputation to multiplexed engagements (Watts, Granovetter, Burt)
• Quantified-self and other communities

 

7/ Presentations and general discussion (session 14)

 

 

Keywords

quantification; networks; social sciences; opinion; digital architectures; digital methods; traces; memetics; attention economy; smart city.

Learning Prerequisites

Required courses

None

Recommended courses

None

Important concepts to start the course

Attention,  appropriation, public

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, the student must be able to:

• Create a user model
• Make a user model by combining data sources
• Design usability tests protocols
• Plan content evolution
• Develop specific metrics
• Elaborate the relevant interpretation of the results

Transversal skills

• Use a work methodology appropriate to the task.
• Give feedback (critique) in an appropriate fashion.
• Take account of the social and human dimensions of the engineering profession.
• Demonstrate the capacity for critical thinking
• Summarize an article or a technical report.

Teaching methods

Highly interactive course including readings and reports, debates, design of methods for small projects.

Expected student activities

Readings every week, documentation for case studies, debates during the sessions, small project in teams of 2.

 

Assessment methods

- 40% Final Individual report in the form of an essay about one specific method (20 pages and a technical summary)

- 20% Reading report and presentation

- 40% Final Project in teams of two.

Supervision

Office hours	Yes
Assistants	Yes
Forum	Yes

Resources

Bibliography

Benkler Yochai (2006), The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale Press.

Boullier, Dominique ; LOHARD, Audrey. (2012) Opinion mining et 'Sentiment analysis : Méthodes et outils. Nouvelle édition [en ligne]. Marseille : OpenEdition Press, (généré le 28 juin 2016). Disponible sur Internet : <http://books.openedition.org/oep/198>

Boullier, Dominique, (2016) Sociologie du numérique, Paris, Armand Colin.

Boullier, Dominique. (2017), « Big data challenges for social sciences: from society and opinion to replications » ISA esymposium, vol.7; issue n°2, 1-17 pp. http://www.sagepub.net/isa/resources/ebulletin_pdf/EBul-Boullier-Jul2017.pdf

Bourdieu P. (1984). Public Opinion Does Not Exist. In A. Mattelart and S. Siegelaub (Eds.) Communication and Class Struggle. New York: International General.

Bowker G. and Leigh Star S. (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press. 377 pp

Boyd Danah (2014). It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Boyd, Danah and Kate Crawford. (2012). 'Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon.' Information, Communication, & Society 15:5, p. 662-679.

Burt, R. (1992), Structural Holes, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press

Callon Michel et Bruno Latour, (1981) « Unscrewing the Big Leviathan : How Actors Macrostructure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them To Do So », in Karin D. Knorr Cetina et Aaron V. Cicourel (dir.), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology : Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies, Boston, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p 277-303

Callon M., Law J., Rip A. (1986). Qualitative Scientometrics. In Callon M., Law J., Rip A., (Ed.). Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology. (pp.103-123), London: Macmillan,

Cardon, Dominique, (2015) À quoi rêvent les algorithmes. Nos vies à l'heure des Big Data, Paris, Seuil.

Cardon Dominique, (2013) « Dans l'esprit du PageRank » Une enquête sur l'algorithme de Google, Réseaux, 2013/1 n° 177, p. 63-95. DOI : 10.3917/res.177.0063

Dennett, D., (2017) From Bacteria to Bach and Back. The Evolution of Minds, Penguin Books.

Descola P. (2013), Beyond Nature and Culture. The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London. URL: https://itp.nyu.edu/classes/interspecies/texts/philippe-descola-beyond-nature-and-culture_ch1.pdf

Descola, P., (2005) Par-delà nature et culture, Paris, Gallimard.

Desrosières, Alain (1998). The politics of large numbers : a history of statistical reasoning. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press

Didier, Emmanuel (2009) En quoi consiste l'Amérique ? Les statistiques, le New Deal et la Démocratie, Paris, La Découverte

Eisenstein, E. (1983). The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gibson, J. J., (1977) 'The Theory of Affordances.' In R. E. Shaw & J. Bransford (eds.), Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ.

Gibson, J. J., (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Hutchins E. (1995) Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, 402 pp.

Hutchins E. and Klausen T., (1995). Distributed Cognition in an Airline Cockpit. URL: http://hci.ucsd.edu/102a/readings/cockpit-cog.pdf

Kahneman D., (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 499 pp.

Katz E. And Lazarsfeld P. (1955). Personal Influence: The Part Played by the People in the Flow of Mass Communication. Glencoe: Free Press.

Kleinberg J., D. Gibson, P. Raghavan (1998). Inferring Web Communities from Link Topology. In Proc. Of The 9th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Hyper-98), (pp. 225'234), New York, June 20-24.

Kleinberg, J. (2002). Bursty and Hierarchical Structure in Streams, Proc. 8th ACM SIGKDD Intl. Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

Latour B., Jensen B., Venturini T., Grauwin S., Boullier D. (2012). The Whole Is Always Smaller Than Its Parts. A Digital Test Of Gabriel Tarde's Monads. British Journal Of Sociology, Volume 63, Issue 4, (Pp. 590'615).

Latour, Bruno (1995). The'pedofil'of Boa Vista: a photo-philosophical montage. Common Knowledge, 4 (1):144-187.

Law John, Ruppert Evelyn and Savage Mike (2011), 'The Double Social Life of Methods', CRESC Working Paper 95.

Leskovec J., L. Backstrom, J. Kleinberg (2009). Meme-Tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle. ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD).

Lessig, L., Code v.2, (2006) URL: http://codev2.cc/download+remix/Lessig-Codev2.pdf

Mackenzie A., (2017), Machine learners: archaeology of a data practice, Cambridge, MIT Press.

Manovich, L., (2015), 'The Science of Culture? Social Computing, Digital Humanities, and Cultural Analytics', URL: http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/088-cultural-analytics-social-computing/cultural_analytics_article_final.pdf

Manovich, L., (2008), Software Takes Command, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. URL: http://softwarestudies.com/softbook/manovich_softbook_11_20_2008.pdf

Marres, N. (2007) The issues deserve more credit pragmatist contributions to the study of public involvement in controversy, Social Studies of Science 37 (5), 759-780

Marres, N. (2015) "Why Map Issues? On Controversy as a Digital Method." Science, Technology & Human Values 40: 655-686

Morozov, E. (2013) To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don't Exist, Allen Lane.

Norman Donald, (1988). The psychology of everyday things. New York: Basic Books, 257 pages.

Norman D., (1999) 'Affordance, conventions, and design' Magazine Interactions. Volume 6 Issue 3, May/June 1999 Pages 38-43. ACM New York, NY, USA

Pentland A. (2014). Social Physics. How Good Ideas Spread. The Lessons From a New Science, Penguin Press.

Rogers, R. A. Digital Methods. Boston. MA: The MIT Press., 2013.

Ruppert, Evelyn, Law, John and Savage, Mike. (2013) Reassembling Social Science Methods: the challenge of digital devices, Theory, Culture & Society, 30(4), pp. 22-46.

Schelling Thomas C. (1971). "Dynamic Models of Segregation," Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 1(2), pp. 143'186.

Shifman, Limor, Memes in Digital Culture, MIT Press, 2014

Tarde, G. (1903) The Laws of Imitation, translated by E.C. Parsons with introduction by F.Giddings, New York, Henry, Holt and Co.

Thaler Richard H., Sunstein Cass R., (2008) Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 293 pp,

Watts D.J.  and P.S. Dodds, Influentials, networks, and public opinion formation, in Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 441'458, JSTOR, 2007.

Ressources en bibliothèque

• Social physics : how good ideas spread : the lessons from a new science / Alex Pentland
• En quoi consiste l'Amérique? : les statistiques, le New Deal et la démocratie / Emmanuel Didier
• Personal influence : the part played by people in the flow of mass communications / Elihu Katz & Paul F. Lazarsfeld
• Memes in digital culture / Limor Shifman
• Sorting things out : classification and its consequences / Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star
• It's complicated : the social lives of networked teens / Danah Boyd
• A quoi rêvent les algorithmes : nos vies à l'heure des Big Data / Dominique Cardon
• La démocratie Internet : promesses et limites / Dominique Cardon
• Digital sociology : the reinvention of social research / Noortje Marres
• To save everything, click here : technology, solutionism, and the urge to fix problems that don't exist / Evgeny Morozov
• La révolution de l'imprimé à l'aube de l'Europe moderne / Elizabeth L. Eisenstein; trad. de l'anglais par Maud Sissung ... [et al.]
• Les lois de l'imitation / Gabriel Tarde
• Opinion mining et sentiment analysis / Dominique Boullier, Audrey Lohard
• Mapping the dynamics of science and technology : sociology of science in the real world / ed. by Michel Callon ... [et al.]
• The wealth of networks : how social production transforms markets and freedom / Yochai Benkler
• Sociologie du numérique / Dominique Boullier
• Digital methods / Richard Rogers

Websites

• https://sites.google.com/site/dominiqueboullier/
• https://shs3g.hypotheses.org/

Videos

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfsv5df8SYw