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An
Interesting Career in Psychology:
Research
Psychology at Microsoft
Mary
Czerwinski , Adaptive Systems and Interaction,
Microsoft Research
 I
have always had an interest in science, and my passion for brain
research and visual information processing eventually led me to
a PhD in cognitive psychology. As part of the PhD process, I was
introduced to computers and, hence, the programming of experiments,
the analysis and modeling of data, and even the presentation of
relatively simple graphics on Tektronix displays. I was excited
by the (then) new area of research, where psychological issues
merged with computer metaphors and models—the field of human-computer
interaction (HCI). However, I was not entirely sure that I wanted
to leave academia. As luck would have it, a “two-body”
problem landed me in a job at Bell Communications Research right
out of graduate school. My job title was “Member of Technical
Staff,” and my responsibilities included writing the specification
for a user interface to packet-switched networking software.
Considering that I was trained formally as a cognitive
psychologist looking at attention and automatic processing, this
was a stretch from my area of expertise. I had no understanding
of HCI standards or guidelines or even for how my background in
psychology would eventually play such a crucial role in my career.
I can still remember the first 3 weeks on the job at Bellcore,
reading an intimidating stack of books on HCI from the extensive
library we had on campus. Soon I learned that the analytical skills,
in addition to the good communication and programming skills,
that I had picked up through my graduate training (thanks to Rich
Shiffrin!) were tools to help my career take off in the area of
iterative design and evaluation of complex computer systems for
human users.
Psychologists have a toolkit of paradigms for
answering questions that often come up in design discussions,
and we know how to run experiments that can quickly bring crucial
data home to design teams, which would otherwise make less well-diagnosed
decisions based primarily on brainstorming. Psychologists also
have an objective eye and utilize user data, not design intuition
or their own habits, to guide complex computer system design.
These skills, if communicated well and performed in a timely manner,
quickly become incorporated into the design process, and the research
psychologist can see their research efforts delivered as hardware
and software products used by millions around the world. This
was the case for me, as I traversed job opportunities from Bellcore
to NASA-Johnson Space Center (via Lockheed), Compaq Computer Corporation,
and finally Microsoft.
After managing a group of usability engineers
in Microsoft’s Interactive Media Group for over 2 years,
I decided that it was time to return to my true passion—research.
In 1997, I joined the User Interface Research group (now called
Adaptive Systems and Interaction) at Microsoft Research, and I
have remained happy and engaged in my research with my colleagues
to this day. I have had the benefit of working on myriad research
projects that keep me on the cutting edge of technology in artificial
intelligence and information visualization. My role is to provide
the “usefulness and usable” check on emerging technology
and to refine our research projects in the face of user data iteratively
over time. In the following few paragraphs, I outline a couple
of recent examples of my research.
How can consumers handle the large number of digital
photos they collect on-line? Can automatically grouping a user’s
personal photographs into clusters improve the speed and/or ease
of browsing those photographs? Together with John Platt, a senior
researcher in the Signal Processing group, we addressed this question
by first building and testing an image browser based on clustering.
In response to issues highlighted by an initial user study, we
created an improved clustering-based image browser. The new browser
creates an automatically generated overview of a set of photographs.
The browser was tested on users’ own photographs against
three other browsers: a hierarchical folder browser, a flat detail
view with no automatically-generated overview, and the original
design. Searching for images with the improved browser produced
greater user satisfaction than the other browsers without sacrificing
performance. This result shows that automatic clustering of personal
photographs is effective—it requires no organization effort
by the user and yet facilitates efficient and satisfying searches.
Some form of automatic photo clustering will eventually be shipped
in Microsoft consumer software.
In the area of hardware and jumbo display design,
we previously reported the benefits of large displays for females
navigating in 3-D virtual worlds (Tan, Robertson, & Czerwinski,
2001). We extended that work with two studies to replicate and
understand the gender/display finding under tighter control conditions.
Specifically, these studies explored the hypothesis that a wider
field of view (FOV) enhances integration of early, piecemeal,
cognitive map information when navigating in both dense and sparse
virtual environments. We compared the effects of FOV and display
size on both male and female users. The first study replicated
the gender-selective benefit from a wider FOV coupled with a large
display for females. The second study suggested that a wider FOV
was useful to females in sparse but especially densely populated
worlds. The findings have serious educational and training implications
for females who use simulated or virtual environments as their
tools and will be presented at the premiere conference on HCI,
the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest
Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) 2002.
These examples give just a glimpse of the variety
of research opportunities that I have before me every day at Microsoft
Research. While I still maintain ties to academia through an adjunct
faculty position at the University of Washington, I have never
regretted moving into the exciting field of HCI. More information
about my projects can be found at www.research.microsoft.com/users/marycz,
and Microsoft opportunities in general are described at www.microsoft.com/jobs. •
(Originally
published in the January/February
2002 issue of Psychological
Science Agenda,
the newsletter of the APA Science Directorate.)
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Careers in Psychology....
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