Fiches de cours

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.

Content:

Session 1 'Cognitive dimensions of UX':

Perception, cognitive bias, gestalt and attention

• Perception and its biases: Illusions, Cue Conflict and Perceptual Distortion, Memory

• System 1 / System 2 (Kahneman)

• Salience, Differential cognition

• Gestalt theory: principles and laws (Wertheimer)

• Distributed cognition approach (Hutchins)

• Attention (Simon, Goldhaber, Kessous, Citton): features, media, dimensions (Ribot), regimes (Boullier), economy and metrics

Session 2 'Semiotics dimensions of UX':

Graphic semiology, maps, and narratology

• Graphic semiology (Bertin)

• Dynamic maps, GIS, folkmapping, GPS, geolocation

• Spatialization of personal experience (Levy)

• Structural semiotics. The 3 axes of the actantial model (Greimas)

• The foundations of story theory (Propp)

• Narratology (Genette)

• Interpretative or textual cooperation (Eco)

• Transtextuality (Barthes)

Session 3 'Design processes':

Design strategies and UX

• Five generations of industrial innovation models: The networking model (Von Hippel, Cardon, Anderson)

• User modeling: Different kinds of design (Norman, Hassenzahl, Tufte, Pine & Gilmore). Differentiate (and combine) interface design, interaction design, information design, experience design

• User-centered design: contextual design and design thinking (Brown, Faste). From prototyping to pretotyping & agile methods

Session 4 'Feedback of UX':

Psychometrics and tests

• Mechanical Turk methods for testing

• Usability testing, calculation criteria and methods: First click testing, card sorting, focus groups, ethnography

• Psychometrics methods and metrics. Individual testing of cognitive activity: eye-tracking and other body sensors.

• Subjective evaluation. Principles, techniques, Lutin gamelab modeling (case study)

Session 5 'Quantification in Social Sciences':

Big Data in quantification history (statistics, surveys, polls and social listening):

• History of Quantification (Desrosières), premodern history, probability (Hacking), the average man (Quételet). Modern era of quantification ' the three generations 3G (Boullier)

• Replications, memetics and propagation analysis (Leskovec and Kleinberg, Bauckhage, Lehman et al.). Two-step flow (Katz and Lazarsfeld) and influence

Session 6 'Audience theories, marketing and methods':

Machine learning, a new era

• Conceptual and social models (Domingos)

• Audience history and metrics for mass media. From public to audience (Park, Tarde), The phantom public (Lippmann), From metrics to Opinion (Gallup's method, Lazarsfeld), audience ratings, mediation

• Behavioural features. Statistical Audience and ML audience. Traceability (AdWords case study)

Session 7 'History of cognitive technologies and innovations':

Historical landmarks in cognitive technologies

• Writing (Goody) history, lists and coding, tables, dashboards, formulas, computational reason (Bachimont)

• Printing (Eisenstein), manipulate, invention and reinvention, looking, writing and reading digital

• From perspective to immersion (Panofsky and Alpers), analytical space, thinking perspective, social immersive practices

Session 8 'History of cognitive technologies and innovations':

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

• ANT, Theory of translation (Callon, Latour, Law) and diffusion (E. Rogers), The socio-technical graph (Pinch and Bijker), types of innovations, creative destruction (Schumpeter). Telecoms, computer interfaces, internet, photography, music. Technical evolution and business models

• Business models for innovation. The Long Tail (Anderson), Wikinomics, the age of access (Rifkin), The Wealth of Networks (Benkler), Free open source software

Session 9 'Cultural differences in user experience':

A primer on anthropology and theories of representation

• The patterns of social space and life-styles (Bourdieu)

• Four ontologies (Descola)

• A non-modern anthropology (Latour)

• Sociolinguistic diversity, digital writing

• Smartphone experience around the world: universal device?, habitèle theory (Boullier)

• Translation and automatization

• Culturonomics (Manovich)

Session 10 'Cultural differences in user experience':

Diffusion and appropriation of innovations

• Diffusion models. Theory of diffusion (E. Rogers)

• Socialization, a concept: « habitus » (Bourdieu), Primary and Secondary Socialization processes (Berger and Luckman, Mead). Generation gap.

• Reinvention beyond needs: desire (Freud, Lacan), demands and consumption, towards a theory of appropriation

Session 11 'Social network analysis and web topologies':

Methods

• Egonetworks (Barnes)

• Structural network analysis: economic sociology approach 'Social Embeddedness' (Polanyi), The strength of weak ties (Granovetter), closed networks and strong ties (Coleman), Six Degrees of Separation (Milgram), Universal small world model (Watts and Strogatz), A Network Threshold Model (Burt), The tipping point (Gladwell)

• Sociology of organizations: strategic analysis (Crozier & Friedberg)

• Social networks topologies (Euler), Hub scores and authority scores (Kleinberg)

• Community management: theory and techniques

• Quantified-self and other communities

Session 12 'Collective engagement in UX':

Online social networks

• Social listening: an example, Linkfluence (Radarly)

• Metrics on social networks, benchmarking, reach, engagement

• Analyzing content and topics: wikipedia, sentiment analysis (Boullier et Lohard, H. C. Anderson), NLP, from sourcing to dashboards, targeting features, conceptual definitions and experts

Session 13: Methodological notes and discussion, students present their project

Session 14: General discussion, students present their project

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.

Websites

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

Videos

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