Setting, tracking and visualizing goals to seek feedback on in-progress creative work

Krishna Kumaran, Sneha R

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115384 Copy

Description

Title

Setting, tracking and visualizing goals to seek feedback on in-progress creative work

Author(s)

Krishna Kumaran, Sneha R

Issue Date

2022-04-10

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Bailey, Brian P

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Bailey, Brian P

Committee Member(s)

• Karahalios, Karrie
• Lewis, Colleen M
• Xie, Charles

Department of Study

Computer Science

Discipline

Computer Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• iteration
• feedback-seeking behavior
• human computer interaction
• educational systems

Abstract

Gathering feedback on early drafts of creative work allows content creators to discover conceptual issues with the work when the issues are least expensive to address. Unfortunately, seeking feedback on early stage ideas and prototypes is not as prevalent as it should be, and prior work has not addressed how to help content creators gain the skill of planning to seek feedback. One method to encourage skill development is through goal setting. Goal setting consists of three steps -- set a goal, track progress to the goal, and realize the goal has been met. Prior work on goal setting shows that when used correctly, it can help novices learn and improve the quality of outcomes. However, goal setting is rarely studied in contexts where progress is difficult to measure via objective outcomes, such as in the context of an iterative, open-ended project. Therefore it is an open question about whether setting feedback goals is an effective technique to promote feedback seeking behavior and how creators think about setting feedback goals in the context of an open-ended project. My dissertation addresses this open question by designing and implementing a new interactive tool that provides a user-centered goal setting experience where a user partitions an open-ended project into small tasks and sets a feedback goal within this representation of the project. The design of the tool (Stratagem) was based on three insights gathered from interviews with fourteen content creators: 1) feedback goals need to connect to the tasks required for content development, 2) users prefer to track progress to a feedback goal with respect to their progress on the entire project itself, and 3) users require flexibility to create feedback goals that are meaningful to them in the context of their work. I further present the results of an experiment comparing the goal setting tool developed in this dissertation (Stratagem) to two common types of goal setting interfaces: a free-form goal interface and a time-centric goal interface. The results show that participants who used Stratagem created goals that were more specific, i.e. related back to the writing process, as compared to participants who wrote free-form or time-centric goals. Additionally, participants who used Stratagem rated their goals as being more meaningful than participants who wrote free-form goals. On the other measures, Stratagem performed no worse than the other two goal setting interfaces. These results demonstrate how a tool can operationalize the three steps of goal setting to support feedback seeking in the context of an open-ended project. I additionally report the results of studies that further our knowledge of goal setting and the design of goal setting tools. In the first study, I test the utility of setting feedback goals in the context of a creative writing task. Participants used a free-form goal interface to plan a feedback goal and tracked progress toward their goal using a slider control. The results show that the proximity of the goal set by a participant affects how developed the writing was at the time a participant sought feedback. Participants who set proximal goals, where they plan to seek feedback at an early stage of writing, seek feedback on a less developed story but also revise more before submitting the final product than participants who set distant goals. The results also showed that participants organically set distant goals (50%) rather than proximal ones (35%). In a second study, I conducted interviews with creators (N=24) to develop a taxonomy of 14 process-related, social, and cognitive factors that are considered prior to initiating a feedback request. I then administered a survey (N=96) to quantify the prevalence of these factors at different stages of the creative process. The taxonomy of feedback seeking behavior provide insights to developers of creativity support tools in how to support users during their feedback process, for example by designing cues to show users they are ready for feedback or assisting users to communicate their progress to a feedback provider. These factors can be leveraged by designers of creativity support tools to develop features to aid users in planning feedback goals and to cue users that they are ready for feedback. This dissertation contributes insights for creativity support tools to incorporate features that promote feedback seeking behavior. The collection of contributions in this dissertation progresses toward a future where all content creators view feedback seeking to be as important as developing the design solution and have the skills and support needed to initiate successful feedback requests.

Graduation Semester

2022-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2021 Sneha Krishna

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