Tumblr Fandoms
In recent years, Tumblr has increased dramatically in popularity and has become one of the fastest growing social networking sites. 
Recently, Tumblr hit mainstream attention when it was purchased by Yahoo! (May 2013). At this time, Tumblr contained 108.4 million blogs and reported 75.8 million posts were being created every day.
We are interested in understanding a broader set of social networking sites by learning about motivations, practices, and social interactions of Tumblr users. By exploring these findings we hope to 1) understanding how people use tumblr and then use this knowledge to improve the user experience, and 2) inform new alternative methods to create successful social networking sites.
Key Publications:
Hillman, S., Procyk, J., and Neustaedter, C. (2014)
“It’s More the Real Me”: The Appropriations of Tumblr by Fandoms
Proceedings of the Grace Hopper Celebration, 2 pages.
Hillman, S., Procyk, J., and Neustaedter, C. (2014)
alksjdf;lksfd: Tumblr and the Fandom User Experience
Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, ACM Press, 10 pgs.
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Hillman, S., Procyk, J., and Neustaedter, C. (2014)
Tumblr Fandoms, Community & Culture
Video Proceedings of the CSCW Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), ACM Press, 4 pgs. + video
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Social Issues in Ubiquitous Commerce
Over the last several years eCommerce has been rapidly transforming in response to the adoption of mobile and social technologies. Specifically, I draw attention to the expanding authority of social networking sites and mobile phone market penetration as prime triggers to this development. This new form of commerce leverages the mass adoption of mobility for real-time access to information, resources and tools that before was only available in a stationary environment. New commerce such as social commerce (sCommerce), mobile commerce (mCommerce), and mobile payment services (MPS), have begun to impact not only developed nations economies (ex. Canada, United States, Europe), but also developing nation’s economies around the world (eg. Kenya, India).
Some new forms of commerce are on the verge of becoming key dominating players within the eCommerce sphere – and some already are. Yet, we still know little about their users and how/if their needs are being supported. This dissertation presents three studies, which explore new commerce users in an effort to identify their social behaviours, activities and routines. Informed from these social issues, the overarching goal is to create design suggestions through empirically supported guidelines and to understand if these new commerce systems have advantages over the more traditional ones.
Key Publications:
Hillman, S., Neustaedter, C., Oduor, E., and Pang, C. (2014)
User Challenges and Successes with Mobile Payment Services in North America
Proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services (MobileHCI 2014), 10 pages.
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Hillman, S. (2014)
Social Issues, Behaviours and Routines of Ubi-Commerce Users in North America
PhD Dissertation, Simon Fraser University.
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Hillman, S. Neustaedter, C., Oduor, E., and Pang, C. (2014)
Mobile Payment Systems in North America: User Challenges & Successes
Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference (2014), ACM Press, 6 Pgs
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Hillman, S. and Neustaedter, C. (2014)
Towards Ubiquitous Commerce: New Commerce, Behaviours & Routines
Workshop on Financial Interactions, Digital Cash, Capital Exchange and Mobile Money (#CHIMoney), held at the ACM CHI Conference (2014), 4 pgs.
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Hillman, S., Neustaedter, C., Pang, C., and Oduor, E. (2013)
“Shared Joy is Double Joy”: The Social Practices of User Networks Within Group Shopping Sites
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press, 10 pgs.
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Hillman, S., and Neustaedter, C. (2012)
Trust in Mobile Shopping: An Empirical Study
User Experience Magazine, Vol. 11(4).
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Hillman, S., Neustaedter, C., Bowes, J., and Antle, A. (2012)
Soft Trust and mCommerce Shopping Behaviors
Proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services MobileHCI, ACM Press, 10 pgs.
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Hillman, S. and Neustaedter, C. (2012)
In mCommerce We Trust: The Social and Trust Behaviours of mCommerce Shoppers
Proceedings of the Workshop on Mobility and Web Behavior at Mobile HCI.
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Hillman, S., Neustaedter, C., and Bowes, J. (2012)
The Routines and Social Behaviours of Frequent mCommerce Shoppers
Extended Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2012), Works-In-Progress, 6 pgs.
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Usability Defender Video Game
December 2010
This paper describes an application, in the form of an educational video game, created for beginner web designers, online marketers, webmasters or any new web publisher with the goal of introducing the basic principles of web usability in a fun way. The game is based on the classic arcade game Galaga (1981) and all educational information originates from Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s research on usability located at useit.com. The application is located in the online portal UsabilityDefender.com.
Keywords: web usability, educational video game, Jakob Nielsen
Game Screen Shots:
