"Re-designing online social platforms to include culturally diverse people"

Golisano College presents Nigini A. Oliveira, faculty candidate in HCI/Accessibility.Abstract:Many successes were achieved through the deployment of global social and collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia, Twitter, and WhatsApp. But technology creators are facing the challenge of making these platforms accessible to the increasingly diverse needs, contexts, and worldviews of its participants. One important issue is that the majority of these online platforms are created by and for young, wealthy, western, and connected citizens, resulting in interaction models that are not aligned with diverse groups of participants. In this talk, I will demonstrate the mismatch between the design of online platforms and the needs of culturally diverse users. Using the example of Stack Overflow, a large online Question & Answer platform, I will show that users from non-Western countries tend to contribute less to the site than those from Western countries and that this is due to specific design decisions that were made by the developers of the site. I will then outline how we can tackle these structural misalignments by identifying participation biases, finding their social and cultural roots, and strategically re-designing interactions with the goal to include non-engaged groups. Bio: Nigini Oliveira is a Human-Computer Interaction researcher with a particular interest in studying, designing, and building social computing systems for inclusivity. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande in Brazil and is now a Postdoctoral fellow at the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His cross-cultural studies and work on large-scale online experimentation have been published in premier venues such as ACM's CHI and CSCW.


Contact
Rhonda Baker
5854757924
Event Snapshot
When and Where
February 01, 2019
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Room/Location: 2400
Who

Open to the Public

Topics
diversity
faculty
research