Mirdori

BTH740 | Weekly Schedule | Research Projects | Research Essay | Student Resources

The Team

• Daniel Hempstead[1]
• Mark Barciak
• Ben Chalovich

eMail All

Web Sites Reviewed

1. http://www.facebook.com/
2. http://mail.google.com/
3. http://www.msn.com/

Thesis Statement

Thesis

First

Second

"Why do people not noticed the slight changes in their daily lives, but when they do notice a change, it seems like they can do nothing but complain about the change."

Third

"Throughout this paper we will examine and explore the effects of change blindness on users as they operate three fast-paced websites: Facebook, Google Mail, and MSN."

Fourth

How do the effects of change blindness negatively affect the usability of three of the most popular dynamic webpages: Facebook, Google Mail and MSN?

Fifth

How do the effects of change blindness affect the usability of three of the most popular dynamic webpages: Facebook, Google Mail and Hotmail?

Current

How do the effects of change blindness affect the usability of Facebook?

Keywords

• change blindness
• attention to detail
• conscious/unconscious thoughts
• vision
• daily routine
• user interfaces

Bibliography

Primary

Surveys, questionaires

Secondary

Daniel J. Simons, "Current Approaches to Change Blindness", VISUAL COGNITION, 2000, 7 (1/2/3), 1-15
<http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.113.9171&rep=rep1&type=pdf>

"Change Blindness", Wikipedia, 3 October, 2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness

Mark Frauenfelder, "Change Blindness Experiment", December 14, 2009
http://boingboing.net/2009/12/14/change-blindness-exp.html

Indiana University, "Change Blindness", February 28, 2006
http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/CogsciSoftware/ChangeBlindness/

J. Kevin O'Regan, "Change Blindness Demonstrations", July 14, 2011
http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/#CB

J. Kevin O'Regan, "Change Blindness", August 8, 2011
http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/ECS/ECS-CB.html

Andrew Dillon, "User Interface Design", October 16, 2005
http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~adillon/BookChapters/User%20Interface%20Design_files/User%20Interface%20Design.htm

Research Notes

Primary Research

Survey

Ask people about what they do on Facebook. This would be a check box list asking:

• Chat
  • Private message
  • Instant message
  • Wall post messages
• Playing games
• Etc...

What do they think is the most important feature of Facebook? Do they find all the features that inform them (directly on Facebook, i.e. without email notification) about activities on Facebook inform them quick enough or well enough? Explain what they like or don't like about the system and what they might change about it.

Change Blindness Test Using Facebook

• We setup 3 Facebook accounts; 1 account for the person being tested and 2 accounts for the people performing the test.
• We used a total of 3 laptops
  • One laptop would have the person being tested, this laptop would have screen capturing software running to record the actions of the users while seeing notifications appearing on the screen.
    • We setup a camera which was pointed at the person being tested to capture the eye movement so we could capture where they were looking, whether their eyes are fixed at the chat window all the time or do they look around the screen.
  • The other laptops which were used to test communicate with the person being tested.
    • One tester chatted with the person being tested (using Facebook chat)
    • The other tester would perform events that would cause notifications on the person being tested's computer.
      • When the person being tested saw a notification appear, they were asked to say "Notification".

Prioritized List of Secondary Sources

Sources

Position	Title	Original Link	Commented Document	Who	Additional Comments/Thoughts	Type of conclusions
1	Current Approaches to Change Blindness	PDF	File:ChangeBlindness Annotated Bjchalovich.pdf	B	A great overview of the topic of change blindness. Supports thesis yet brings to light some challenges it may face.	Abductive
2	Change-blindness as a result of mudsplashes	PDF		M	Interesting section. Talks about what change blindness is, as well as includes a study to "validate" the theory. It followed what we are testing with our personal research, but on a different path (pictures, FaceBook).	Abductive
3	Beyond the Grand Illusion	PDF	File:Grandillusion Annotated bjchalovich.pdf	B	A more physical look at change blindness and how human biology can be a factor	Deductive
4	Neural correlates of change detection and change blindness	PDF	File:BeckRees.pdf	D	Interesting article, however mainly talked about research that was done using MRI's and how the brain reacts during change blindness tests. I don't think for our tests we could test anything this in depth.	Deductive
5	Change Blindness Blindness: The Metacognitive Error of Overestimating Change-detection Ability	PDF	N/A	D	Good article that we could use to help present the findings of our primary research, however there was little to nothing of value for our subject since it did not have anything to do directly with our thesis, but more with presenting the findings from someone elses research.	Deductive
6	Change blindness: Past, present, and future	PDF	N/A	B	Repetitive, the very first source we looked at had the same content.	Dismissed
7	Scene Context and Change Blindness: Memory Mediates Change Detection	PDF	N/A	M	This has been dismissed because of the fact that there are spelling mistakes. SPELLING AND GRAMMAR MISTAKES.	Dismissed

Notes

Current Approaches to Change Blindness - Daniel J. Simons - Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Highlights and Quotes

"Across saccades, blinks, blank screens, movie cuts, and other interruptions, observers fail to detect substantial changes to the visual details of objects and scenes." (pg. 1)

"People also show change blindness when the original and altered image are separated by a “mudsplash” (O’Regan, Rensink, & Clark, 1999), by a cut or pan in a motion picture (Hochberg, 1986; Levin & Simons, 1997; Simons, 1996), and even by a real-world disruption (Simons & Levin, 1998)." (pg.2)

"Phillips, 1974; Simons, 1996). In the flicker paradigm, an original and modified image are presented in rapid alternation with a blank screen between them. Observers respond as soon as they detect the changing object. Research using this paradigm has produced two primary findings: (1) observers rarely detect changes during the first cycle of alternation, and some changes are not detected even after nearly 1 minute of alternation (Rensink et al., 1997); and (2) changes to objects in the “centre of interest” of a scene are detected more readily than peripheral or “marginal interest” changes (Rensink et al., 1997)," (pg.3)

"Both the flicker paradigm and the forced choice detection paradigm are intentional change detection tasks in that observers know that changes will occur and actively search the display to find differences. This work demonstrates that observers are change blind evenwhen their primary task is to search for change." (pg.4)

Outline of the Argument

• Introduction
  • What is Change Blindness?
  • Describe our topic
• Describe our thought process for doing our primary research
  • What did we do for our research
  • Results of our findings
    • Compare the results from the survey and the change blindness test to see if what people perceive they see matches what we saw.
• Conclusion

Write up

Title

Change blindness in web pages

Abstract

This research essay will primarily focus on the effects of change blindness through examining one of the largest used and most heavily, on the fly, modified webpages out there, Facebook. [add more here at some later point]

Key Words

• Change blindness
• Attention to detail
• Conscious/unconscious thoughts
• Vision
• Daily routine
• User interfaces

Introduction

People are using social media more and more to be one of their primary means of communicating with other people. One of the major social media sites used by people is Facebook which, as of September 2011 (according to Wikipedia), has 800 million active users. Facebook is always introducing new features to allow people to keep in contact with others. Some of these features include instant chat between friends as well as small pop-up notifications and news feeds which inform the user about their friends activities. With all these features that Facebook developers are implementing, are they truly necessary and do the users who use Facebook actually make use of these features or are the developers spending their time developing features that for the typicaly Facebook user, they would never notice?

In the late 1970s, the first research into the new recognized phenomenon, change blindness began. According to Wikipedia, “change blindness is a normal phenomenon of the brain which show in light that the brain does not have a precise representation of the world but a lacunar one, made of partial details.” (Change Blindness wiki). In spite of its name, change blindness does not have to do with a person’s eyes but in fact how the brain perceives information. Research in this phenomenon is still fairly new, however the research “suggests that the brain estimates the importance and usefulness of informations prior to deciding to store them or not. Another issue is that the brain cannot see a change happening to an element that it has not yet stored” (Change Blindness wiki). Many examples of change blindness can be found by simply searching on YouTube. An example of chance blindness on YouTube was a scenario where several people, one-at-a-time entered an office, we’ll call them candidates, and someone behind a counter, we’ll call them the employee, handed them a simple survey to fill in. Once the survey was completed and returned to the employee, the employee would duck behind the counter to file the survey. While the employee was ducked behind the counter, another employee would stand back up, in the same location as the first employee, and gave them a form and asked the candidate to walk down the hall. Once the candidate walked down the hall, someone asked them how many employees did they deal with at the counter. All the candidates said that they dealt with one employee. The person at the end of the hallway had to inform all the candidates that they were all incorrect and explained that the employees switched halfway through the survey process.

When we first were introduced to change blindness in our BTH740 - Human Factors in Computing course at Seneca College and looked at change blindness videos online, we just found it to be fascinating phenomenon. As someone watching these videos or hearing stories, we couldn’t believe that people could have something major change in front of them, but because they were so focused on something else, typically something even smaller, they didn’t notice the big picture changing. With this in mind, we started thinking about how software systems are very dynamic and may contain several sections of a page automatically updating and being modified at once. We started wondering if change blindness would have any affect on the software that we will be writing in the future. When we were thinking of the future, we started thinking about the present and whether we might even be unaware of change blindness in software or other systems that we used currently. That is when we started wondering if even while we are using Facebook if there might be things that occur on the screen that we are completely unaware occured.

Purpose

The purpose of this essay was to explore whether or not the effects of change blindness affect users of Facebook as part of our final research essay for Seneca College’s fourth year Bachelors of Software development - Human Interactions with Computers course.

Thesis Statement

How do the effects of change blindness affect the usability of Facebook?

Body

External Research

In order to create our tests we needed to look into the research which has already been conducted in the field of change blindness.

The setup

As part of our primary research we decided to conduct two experiments. The first was a surface quiz of sorts where we simply polled people on their Facebook experiences to see if we were heading in the right direction. The second was a longer form of analysis where we had them use Facebook and we would record the results.

To begin our research, we surveyed Facebook users about their Facebook use habits. Our demographic for our tests were young adults between the ages 17-25 who were attending a post-secondary institution. We began by asking them how they used Facebook to communicate with others. They were given the option of private messaging (i.e. the Facebook message feature), instant messaging (i.e. Facebook chat) or using wall posts.

Our second wave of research consisted of a booth setup outside of Seneca@York’s library and computing commons. Our demographic for our tests were young adults between the ages 17-25 who were attending a post-secondary institution. We had a table setup with three laptops, two running windows 7 for the testers and one running Fedora 15 for the subject. The subjects’ computer was also outfitted with gtk-recordMyDesktop, to view the users actions on the webpage in conjunction with a FujiFilm Finepix camera mounted above the screen to record their eye movements. We utilized three supervising researchers throughout the process, the first two operating the windows 7 laptops and the third to setup and supervise the subject.

Procedure

[Insert the procedure for the first experiment here]

The procedure for the second experiment was quite simple contrary to the setup. It consisted of a very basic premise. The test subject would be viewing the Facebook home page, a chat window was open to one of the researchers. The researcher would then periodically send simple maths to the subject to which they would have to solve and respond (ex. 2x4). Periodically the second researcher would ‘Like’ or ‘Post’ something on the subject wall causing a popup to appear in the bottom left-hand corner of their screen. The subject would then have to verbally say ‘notification’ to show that they noticed the change.

Data collection

For collecting data, for both tests we ran into difficulty due to the sample size. Since we were setup near the entrance to the library and computing commons we were frequently turned down for volunteers to participate in either of our studies. That being said we managed to get a larger sample for our smaller test due to it’s small temporal footprint. The longer test got mixed answers ranging from ignoring our offer to promising to come back.

For our first test the process of collecting data was [insert first test results]

For our second test the data extraction process was a bit more complex. We had three pieces of data that we had to look at: The eye movement in the film of the participant, so we could not when their eyes moved to the notification; the screen recording which shows us when the notifications appeared to the subject; and the audio also from the film which recorded when the user noticed the change. We then took the eye movements and compared them to the desktop recording to piece together whether or not they were blind to the notifications. The audio was later referenced to determine if their eye movements lied in a fashion and although they saw the change they did not actively process it.

Results

Our results were varied depending on the tests we completed and admittedly, although our research only represents a small sample size, it seems to have some consistency of results.

In our first test [Insert stats here]

In our second test we experienced a wide array of results. They ranged from participants immediately recognizing the change to users who had only a minor delay. With the amount of variables that are inherently part of our test [Needs to be completed]