In the 2022 spring quarter, I took CS347: Human-Computer Interaction: Foundations and Frontiers at Stanford University. For the class, we worked in teams of four on a final research project in addition to reading and critquing HCI research papers. My team worked on building and evaluating a prototype social annotation tool for research papers with integrated visualization features designed to 1) help learners navigate annotation threads and 2) encourage learners to engage in balanced discussions.
We evaluated the prototype tool with 8 participants who were split into experimental and control groups. Though we don’t claim statistical significance in our results, our user study revealed that the experimental group (who had access to the visualization features) explored more annotation threads and created more comments than the control group. These results showed promise that integrated interactive visualizations of annotation data can help facilitate navigation and motivate individual contribution.
As the main visualization designer and developer on the team, I submitted the project results to IEEE VIS 2022 as a poster and presented it virtually at the conference. You can find both the 2-page poster summary here, the poster I designed here, and the poster preview video I recorded below: