spammers and their resources, both botnets and humans, remain alive and well. If email spam continues to become less and less profitable, then they will simply send spam in other forms such as on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Individual computers continue to get infected and people still foolishly click on requests from Nigerian princes. Unfortunately, we have to continue to apply technological fixes to our networks and teach people not to be so gullible.

Believe me, I wish we could declare victory, but we’re not there yet.

—Will Hartmann

michael Bernstein’s
“clay Shirky: Doing
work, or Doing Work?”
http://cacm.acm.org/
blogs/blog-cacm/72609
MSN usability research-
ers were stumped. Their usability lab
had tested just about every aspect of
its MSN portal and had been pleased to
find that it consistently scored higher
than its competitors. Yet a user base
didn’t flock to MSN—the portal simply
could not attract and retain as many
users as it wanted. Then Clay Shirky
relayed the million-dollar question:
Were these tasks that users actually
wanted to do? Or were these highly us-
able aspects of the site going to remain
unused because nobody wanted to use
them? There was a gaping hole be-
tween usability and usefulness.

bernsteIn PHotoGraPH by Jason dorFMan

In a keynote delivered to this year’s ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), author and academic Clay Shirky captured this question in a distinction between Work and work. Work (Capital W) is what we have considered for years; your boss tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid. By contrast, work (little w) is motivated by inherent interest and is generally unpaid. Think of the difference between an Encyclopedia Britannica editor doing Work and a Wikipedia editor doing work during spare hours. Big Work drives the economy; little work drives the Internet. Big Work builds skyscrapers; little work generates a half-million fan fiction stories about Harry Potter.

Clay argued that user-testing techniques developed over the past 25 years for Work no longer apply for work. We shouldn’t be asking, “Can you complete the task?” but rather “Are you mo-

blog@cacm

“usability is an
important refinement
technique when you
have a good idea,
but it is a horrible
determiner of utility
on a grander scale.”

tivated to do it in the first place?” Excel needs usability testing because people are forced to use it for Work; technology for work instead needs to understand users’ underlying motivations.

Extrapolating on my own here: Usability is an important refinement technique when you have a good idea, but it is a horrible determiner of utility on a grander scale. (Sure, pay me $10 for a lab study and I’ll use anything for an hour!) Usability is a local hill-climbing algorithm. We need techniques to make and evaluate that miraculous motivational leap, whether it’s derived from the design process or social science. Develop that and you could save thousands of man-hours developing tools that nobody will ever want to use.

 

Reader’s comment:

Jared Spool, for years, talked about compelled shopping tasks in which people were actually given money to buy things on Internet sites, and could not. He really wanted to solve the usability problem, but also realized that decoupling the motivational issues with usability is difficult. Little ‘w’ work vs. Big ‘W’ Work suggests that we are going to have to dig much deeper into this issue than we had before.

—Ed H. Chi

erika S. Poole’s
“Death and the
Digital World”
http://cacm.acm.org/
blogs/blog-cacm/72837
At the Computer Support-
ed Cooperative Work 2010 conference,
13 Ph.D. students received invitations
to participate in the Doctoral Colloqui-
um, an event in which new scholars dis-
cuss their work with a panel of experts.
In addition to being a great opportunity
for students, the Doctoral Colloquium
highlights some of the most exciting
work in the field from promising young
scholars. In particular, I couldn’t help
but notice that the students invited to
this year’s event presented work high-
lighting the deeply human side of infor-
mation technology.

Greg Linden is the founder of Geeky Ventures. Michael Bernstein is a Ph.d. student in the Computer science and artificial Intelligence lab at Massachusetts Institute of technology. Erika Shehan Poole is an assistant professor at the school of Information sciences and technology at Penn state university.