Is This What You Meant? Promoting Listening on the Web with Reflect
Travis Kriplean, Michael Toomim, Jonathan Morgan, Alan Borning, and Andrew Ko. 2012. Is this what you meant?: promoting listening on the web with reflect. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1559-1568. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208621
Summary:
In this paper, the author focused on the lack of support for active listening which could actually undermine discussion and deliberation on the Web. Hence, this paper contributes a design frame identifying potential improvements to web discussion were listening more explicitly encouraged in interfaces. For the mechanics of the Reflect interface, it is designed for readers, listeners, and speakers with different functions. As a result, this interface design could help improve interpersonal dynamics and summarize long discussions.
Reflection:
According to the paper, we can know that listening interfaces enable people to see evidence that they are being heard, improving their communication satisfaction and willingness to the participant. And Listening interfaces empower participants to use and hone their active listening skills to guide the discussion and demonstrate their own worth. What’s more listening interfaces help establish an empathetic normative environment. Based on this knowledge, we could understand the importance of listening interface.
I really like the listeners’ design in Reflect interface. Because in this part, any reader can become a listener by restating a point they hear the commenter making in 140 characters or less. The limitation of characters could let people focus on some important words and sentences, instead of a long paragraph. And the transmission from reader to listener could also help people improve their experiment. And after restarting, the system also allows the listener to connect their bullet point to the relevant sentences in the comment. This could actually help others to concentrate this part together.