Changes

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]

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 [http://www.wikipedia.org/ 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.

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. To begin, we sat down and discussed what questions we would need to ask people to gather information about how they use Facebook and what areas of the main Facebook page we would want to focus our attention when we would test them in our second wave of testing.

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.

The procedure for our first experiment was simple, we printed off our questionnaire and asked a few people to complete the survey. We never collected any personal information about the people being surveyed and the people being surveyed were informed about this. Once the person was finished filling in the survey, they returned it to us.

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.

For collecting data, for both tests we ran into difficulty due to the sample size. For our second test, 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. We also had the difficulty that since we had a Student Federation banner (this because we needed permission, which we obtained from Student Federation, to perform our survey in the halls of Seneca College), students thought we were representing Student Federation and would ask us about bus schedules or information regarding services offered at the college.

For our first test the process of collecting data was done by asking a few students in the Open Lab to fill in our survey. As stated before, we simply just had the people answer the questions in the survey. Most of the questions were of the genre of circle which ones apply to you or circle one and explain why/why not.

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.

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]

Based on the research we conducted it is hard to make any definite conclusions but upon combining our research with what we have learned from other papers the evidence eludes to the fact that change blindness is not prevalent in users of Facebook. Another conclusion, although accidental, brought about by our research is that conducting human interactions with computer testing is difficult to attempt in a public setting. The general setup for the test is daunting to most and takes up too much time for most to place into their schedules unless you have some relation to them.