Title: Surfacing and Designing for Participant Learning and Interest in Online Experiments
Advisors: Katharina Reinecke and Gary Hsieh
Abstract:
Online experiments have become more widely used and validated in fields ranging from psychology to computer science to medicine. They enable researchers to collect data from more numerous and geographically diverse samples, enhancing sample representativeness and generalizability of results. Despite these benefits for researchers, participants' needs and interests have not been understood or prioritized.
In this talk, I will discuss empirical findings about participants' motivations, the possibility of using online experiments for scientific learning, and researchers' challenges in designing for participants' interests that motivated the design and evaluation of Digestif, a system to support researchers in relaying research context to participants. I will conclude this talk with avenues of future work that further include participants in the design of online experiments and possibilities of extending this work in other domains.