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Kerry Rodden

I've been a researcher in the field of human-computer interaction since 1995. This site gives a brief outline of some of the projects I've worked on, with links to selected publications. You can also just see a full list of publications by itself.

 

Google work

I'm a user experience researcher at Google.  My work there is very product-focused, and only a small subset of my projects have been suitable for publication.  Most of my publications have resulted from collaborations with the interns I've been lucky enough to host (Xin Fu, Laura Granka, Adam Kramer, and Ian Spiro).

I'm currently leading the quantitative user experience team, which I started.  We analyze large-scale data (e.g. from web analytics or surveys) to generate insights about how our products are being used.  We also define and track metrics to measure the impact of changes to the user experience.
  • I. Au, R. Boardman, R. Jeffries, P. Larvie, A. Pavese, J. Riegelsberger, K. Rodden, and M. Stevens, User experience at Google: focus on the user and all else will follow, Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI 2008. [ACM Digital Library]
  • A. Kramer and K. Rodden, Word usage and posting behaviors: modeling blogs with unobtrusive data collection methods, Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008. [ACM Digital Library]
  • A. Kramer and K. Rodden, Applying a User-Centered Metric to Identify Active Blogs (poster presentation), Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI 2007. [ACM Digital Library]
I used to lead user experience research for web search, including using eye-tracking to study how people scan a search results page.
You can see an example in this video clip, which I made a while ago.  It shows 3 different users scanning the same results page (the pink dot shows where the user was looking; the bigger it is, the longer they looked at that spot).  If you are able to see the mouse pointer in the clip, you can also watch for examples of eye-mouse coordination - the second user is the most interesting.


Anne Aula and I recently wrote a post on the Google blog about how eye-tracking helped inform the design of universal search - in particular, to study the impact of adding thumbnail images to certain results.  The video clip from the post is below.


Before that I worked on a number of other Google products, designing and conducting user studies with a range of different methodologies.  We were able to publish papers about two of those projects.
  • Y. Nakhimovsky, R. Schusteritsch, and K. Rodden, Scaling the card sort method to over 500 items: Restructuring the Google AdWords Help Center, Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI 2006. [ACM Digital Library]
  • R. Schusteritsch, S. Rao, and K. Rodden, Mobile Search with Text Messages: Designing the User Experience for Google SMS, Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI 2005. [ACM Digital Library]

 

Post-PhD work

Before Google, and after my PhD, I spent some time at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, working as a consultant to the Integrated Systems group, in collaboration with Alan Blackwell and Rachel Jones. Our projects included improving history mechanisms for web browsers, and exploring new web search interfaces for mobile devices.

  • R. Jones, N. Milic-Frayling, K. Rodden, A. Blackwell, Contextual Method for the Redesign of Existing Software Products, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 2007, 22(1-2). Earlier version available as Microsoft Research Tech Report MSR-TR-2004-96: [PDF]
  • A. Blackwell, R. Jones, N. Milic-Frayling, and K. Rodden, Combining Logging with Interviews to Investigate Web Browser Usage in the Workplace, Position paper for workshop Usage analysis: Combining Logging and Qualitative Methods, ACM CHI 2005.
  • N. Milic-Frayling, R. Jones, K. Rodden, G. Smyth, A. Blackwell, and R. Sommerer, SmartBack: Supporting Users in Back Navigation, Proceedings of WWW 2004. [ACM Digital Library]
  • N. Milic-Frayling, R. Sommerer, and K. Rodden, WebScout: Support for Revisitation of Web pages within a Navigation Session, Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2003). [IEEE Xplore]
  • K. Rodden, N. Milic-Frayling, R. Sommerer and A. Blackwell, Effective Web Searching on Mobile Devices, Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI 2003). [PDF]

    Alan Blackwell and I also worked together to produce a new electronic edition of Ivan Sutherland's 1963 PhD thesis on Sketchpad.

    • A. Blackwell and K. Rodden, Editors' introduction to new electronic edition of Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System by Ivan Sutherland, Technical Report 574, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, 2003. [PDF]

     

    PhD research

    I did my PhD at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and submitted my thesis, Evaluating Similarity-Based Visualisations as Interfaces for Image Browsing, in October 2001. My research combined elements of human-computer interaction, information retrieval, image retrieval, and information visualization.

    • K. Rodden, Evaluating Similarity-Based Visualisations as Interfaces for Image Browsing, PhD thesis (and Technical Report 543), University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, October 2001. [HTML abstract] [PDF]

    I carried out experiments considering whether arranging a set of images on the screen according to their mutual "similarity" (so that images which are alike are placed close to each other) is helpful to the user when browsing the set. Below you can see two different layouts of a set of 100 images of Kenya: on the left, they are arranged according to visual similarity, and on the right, for comparison, they are placed in a default ordering.

    Arrangement based on visual similarity Default ordering

    The main experiment used graphic design students as the participants, with a task involving selecting photographs from a set to illustrate a given piece of text.

    • K. Rodden, W. Basalaj, D. Sinclair, and K. Wood, Does Organisation by Similarity Assist Image Browsing?, Proceedings of ACM CHI 2001. [PDF]

    There are many ways in which "similarity" can be defined; I used measurements based on low-level visual properties (such as colour and texture), and on textual captions. To construct the arrangements, I used multidimensional scaling software developed as part of Wojciech Basalaj's research.

    • K. Rodden, W. Basalaj, D. Sinclair, and K. Wood, Evaluating a Visualisation of Image Similarity as a Tool for Image Browsing, Proceedings of IEEE InfoVis'99. [PDF]

    I was also interested in how people would organize and browse their personal photographs once the usage of digital cameras was more widespread, and conducted a six-month field study (in collaboration with AT&T Laboratories Cambridge) where the participants were given digital cameras and copies of AT&T's Shoebox software. I analyzed usage logs, and interviewed the participants at the beginning and end of the study.

    • K. Rodden and K. Wood, How do People Manage Their Digital Photographs?, Proceedings of ACM CHI 2003. [PDF]

     

    Earlier work

    In the summer of 1997 I worked with Matthew Chalmers as an intern at UBS Ubilab in Zürich, Switzerland. We developed a system to record users' paths through the Web, using a form of collaborative filtering to recommend resources via sharing of paths.

    • M. Chalmers, K. Rodden, and D. Brodbeck, The Order of Things: Activity-Centred Information Access, Proceedings of the Seventh International World Wide Web Conference, 1998. [HTML]

    The system was also featured in the book Digital Information Graphics by Matt Woolman.

     

    Email me

    I'm sure you can figure out the address: it's (my first name) at (my last name), dot org.