Kristin B. Stecher

University of Washington

Social Psychology

Advisors

Microsoft Research: Scott Counts

Microsoft Research: Lili Cheng

Primary Advisor: Jason Plaks

Supervising Advisor: Yuichi Shoda

Graduate Student Representative: David McDonald

Undergraduate advisor: Mikki Hebl

Research Interests

Microsoft Labs

2009-2010, Microsoft Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs

Kodu
Currently studying the use of Kodu, "a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games" in the lab and in the classroom. Conducted usability studies and deployed longitudinal surveys in elementary schools. This winter I will run an after school program using Kodu at a local elementary school.

Bing Twitter
Usability testing for social search.

Microsoft Research

2006-9 Creative Systems and VIBE Groups

Profiles Research
Applying methods and phenomena from social and cognitive psychology to understand the way users process and interpret online profiles in social networks.  Found that people need relatively few attributes to make meaningful inferences about profiles and that profiles that contain coherent traits are remembered better than those that do not.

Social Networks in the Enterprise
Studying the usage and spread of a Microsoft internal social network. Analyzing instrumentation logs and conducting surveys to make recommendations for other social networks in the enterprise.

Social Views of Email and Salsa
Evidence from user studies, instrumentation logs and surveys demonstrate that demonstrates that using 'Social Views of Email' helps users prioritize thier email. This project and the 'Salsa' project both use social content to enhance email communications.

DataDepot
Allowing people to collaborate thorugh data analysis. It is possible to input your own data in DataDepot or discuss one of thousands of seeded datasets. Our research in this space demonstrates that crowdsourcing can be used to make sense of rich datasets. Also we show that lay scientists, like professional scientists can work together to contribute meaningful analyses.

Dissertation Research

Spontaneous Inferences
Impressions about personality often form automatically. This research demonstrates that perceivers attend to, and remember information about actors’ goals and traits in a variety of situations.

Undergraduate Research

Hiring Decisions in the Newsroom
How do people use racial cues to make hiring decisions? These studies looked at real world environments and assessed people's hiring preferences in the newsroom and the effects of affirmative action.

Contact me at: stech@u.washington.edu