Research Scientist/Design Researcher
Contact: michael_muller@us.ibm.com
Research Interests:
Social Software (qualitative and quantitative studies)
Metrics for the success of social software
Communities of practice
Participatory design
Methods for analysis, design, and assessment
Michael works as a Research Scientist / Research Staff Member in the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Group. He is an internationally recognized expert in participatory design, having co-developed participatory practices such as PICTIVE, CARD and Participatory Heuristic Evaluation. He has also been recognized through several invited book chapters in handbooks of human-computer interaction, keynote speaker at SIGDOC 2007, membership on panels at the National Science Foundation, and a three-year appointment to a study group at the National Academy of Sciences, resulting in the 2007 book, Human-System Integration in the System Development Process: A New Look.
Michael's current research is under the umbrella of CUE's long-standing interest in social software (leading to Lotus Connections Activities and Lotus Connections Dogear), and the recently announced Center for Social Software. This year, Michael is working with Joan DiMicco and Beth Brownholtz to develop metrics and analytics for the health of social software applications (e.g., components of Lotus Connections), and of the entities within those applications (e.g., communities of practice, teams, "evangelists"). Their last year's work, Return On Contribution (ROC), provided a first metric of the benefits from individual contributions to other users in enterprise social software applications.
Before coming to Lotus, Michael worked in research and practice in usability, user-centered design, and work analysis at Microsoft, U.S. West Advanced Technologies, Bellcore, and IBM.
Michael serves on IBM's Collaboration Invention Development Team. He earned a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Rutgers University.
Projects:
Social Software Application Health
Metrics and Analytics for Social Software
Unified Activity Management
Instant Collaboration / ActivityExplorer
Designers Community of Practice
Publications:
2009
Chen, J., Geyer, W., Dugan, C., Muller, M., & Guy, I. (2009). “Make new friends but keep the old”: Recommending people on social networking sites. Proc CHI 2009, in press.
Storey, M.A., Ryall, J., Singer, J., Myers, D., Cheng, L.-T., & Muller, M. (2009). How software developers use tagging to support reminding and refinding. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering in press.
2008
DiMicco, J., Millen, D.R., Geyer, W.G., Dugan, C. Brownholtz, B., & Muller, M. (2008). Motivations for social networking at work. Proc CSCW 2008.
Evenson, S., Muller, M., Roth, E., (2008). Capturing the context of use to inform system design. Journal of Cognitive Decision Making 2(3), 181-203.
Geyer, W., Dugan, C. DiMicco, J., Millen, D.R., Brownholtz, B., & Muller, M. (2008) Use and Reuse of Shared Lists as a Social Content Type. Proc CHI 2008.
Muller, M.J. (2008). Participatory design: The third space in HCI (revised). In J. Jacko and A. Sears (eds.), Human-Computer Interaction: Development Process. Mahway NJ USA: Erlbaum.
Shen, J., Geyer, W., Muller, M.J., Dugan, C., Brownholtz, B., & Millen, D.R. (2008). Automatically finding and recommending resources to support knowledge workers’ activities. Proc IUI.
Thom-Santelli, J., Muller, M.J., & Millen, D.R. (2008) Social tagging roles: Publishers, evangelists, leaders. Proc CHI 2008.
2007
Dugan, C., Muller, M.J., Millen, D.R., Geyer, W., Brownholtz, B., & Moore, M. (2007). The Dogear game: A social bookmark recommender system. Proc GROUP 2007, Sanibel Island, FL, USA, November 2007.
Farrell, S.P., Lau, T., Wilcox, E., & Muller, M.J. (2007). Socially augmenting employee profiles with people-tagging. Proc UIST 2007.
Li, L., Muller, M.J., Geyer, W., Dugan, C., Brownholtz, B., & Millen, D.R. (2007). Predicting individual priorities of shared activities using support vector machines. Proc. CIKM 2007.
Muller, M.J. (2007). Collaborative activity management: Organizing documents for collective action. Proc. SIGDOC 2007 (keynote address).
Muller, M.J. (2007). Comparing tagging vocabularies among four enterprise tag-based services. Proc. GROUP 2007.
Muller, M.J. (2007). Participatory design: The third space in HCI. In J. Jacko and A. Sears (eds.), Handbook of HCI. Mahway NJ USA: Erlbaum.
Muller, M.J. (2007). Revisiting an Ethnocritical Approach to HCI: Verbal Privilege and Translation. In T. Erickson and D. McDonald, HCI remixed: Reflections on notable HCI papers. MIT Press.
Muller, M.J., Geyer, W., Brownholtz, B., Dugan, C., Millen, D.R., and Wilcox, E. (2007). Tag-Based Metonymic Search in an Activity-Centric Aggregation Service. Proc ECSCW 2007, Limerick, Ireland, September 2007.
Pew, R.W., and Mavor, A. with 12 committee members (2007),. Human-System Integration in the System Development Process: A New Look. Washington, DC, USA: National Academies Press.
Rivadeneira, W.A., Gruen, D.M., Muller, M.J., and Millen, D.R. (2007). Getting our head in the clouds: Toward evaluation studies of tagclouds. Proc CHI 2007.
2006
Adlin, T., Hynes, C., Pruitt, J., McGrane, K., Goodwin, K., Rosenstein, A., and Muller, M.J. (2006). Panel: Putting personas to work. Panel at CHI 2006.
Geyer, W., Muller, M.J., Moore, M.T., Wilcox, E., Cheng, L.-T., Brownholtz, B., Hill, C., and Millen, D.R. (2006). Activity explorer: Activity-centric collaboration from research to product. IBM Systems Journal 45(4),713-738.
Kogan, S., and Muller, M.J. (2006). Ethnographic study of collaborative knowledge work. IBM Systems Journal 45(4),759-772.
Moody, P.M., Gruen, D., Muller, M.J., Tang, J.C., and Moran, T.P. (2006). Business activity patterns: A new model for collaborative business applications. IBM Systems Journal 45(4), 683-694.
Scott, S.D., Muller, M.J., Moran, T.P., Bardram, J.E., Nardi, B., and Wu, M. (2006). Awareness in activity-centric groupware design. Workshop at CSCW 2006.
Sen, S., Geyer, W., Muller, M.J., Moore, M., Brownholtz, B., Wilcox, E., & Millen, D.R. (2006). FeedMe: A collaborative alert filtering system. Proc. CSCW 2006.
Tang, J.C., Liu, S.B., Muller, M.J., Drews, C., and Lin, J. (2006). Unobtrusive but invasive: Using screen recording to collect field data on computer-mediated interaction. Proc CSCW 2006.
2005
Light, A., Wild, P.J., Deardan, A., and Muller, M.J. (2005). Quality, value(s), and choice: Exploring wider implications of HCI practice. Workshop at CHI 2005.
Millen, D.R., Muller, M.J., Geyer, W., Wilcox, E., and Brownholtz, B., (2005). Patterns of media use in an activity-centric environment. Proceedings of CHI 2005.
Muller, M.J., and Gruen, D.M. (2005). Working together inside an emailbox. Proceedings of ECSCW 2005.
Muller, M.J., Minassian, S.O., Geyer, W., Millen, D.R., Brownholtz, E., and Wilcox, E. (2005). Studying appropriation in activity-centric collaboration. International Reports on Socio-Informatics 2(2), 50-58. http://www.iisi.de/fileadmin/IISI/upload/IRSI/IRSIv2i2complete.pdf.
2004
Brownholtz, B., Geyer, W., Muller, M.J., Wilcox, E., and Millen, D.R. (2004). Explorations in an activity-centric collaboration environment. Demonstration at CHI 2004.
Dave, K., Wattenberg, M., and Muller, M.J. Flash forums and forumreader: Navigating a new kind of large-scale online discussion. Proceedings of CSCW 2004.
Muller, M.J. (2004). Activity graphs of the microstructure of complex work. Poster at CSCW 2004.
Muller, M.J. (2004). Multiple paradigms in affective computing. Interacting with Computers.
Muller, M.J. (2004). “Readness” – A design exploration of personal document management in historical and collaborative context. Poster at CHI 2004.
Muller, M.J., Geyer, W., Brownholtz, B., Wilcox, E., and Millen, D.R. (2004). One-hundred days in an activity-centric collaboration environment based on shared objects. Proceedings of CHI 2004.
Selected earlier publications
Carotenuto, L., Etienne, W., Fontaine, M., Friedman, J., Muller, M.J., Newberg, H., Simpson, M., Slusher, J., and Stevenson, K. (1999). CommunitySpace: Towards flexible support for voluntary knowledge communities. Presented at Changing Places workshop, London UK, April 1999.
Cohen, A.L., Cash, D., and Muller, M.J. (2000). Designing for adversarial collaboration. Proceedings of CSCW 2000.
Druin, A.D., and Muller, M.J., with Bratteteig, T., Gaver, B., John, B., and Rettger, M.B. (2002). Panel: What kind of work is HCI work? CHI 2002 Extended Abstracts. Minneapolis MN USA: ACM..
Geyer, W., Cheng, L.-T., Vogel, J., and Muller, M.J. (2004). Personal peer-to-peer collaboration based on shared objects. Book chapter to appear in Subramanian, R., and Goodman, B., (eds.), Peer-to-peer computing: The evolution of a disruptive technology.
Geyer, W., Vogel, J., Cheng, L.-T., and Muller, M.J. (2003). Supporting activity-centric collaboration through peer-to-peer shared objects. Proceedings of GROUP 2003. Sanibel Island FL USA: ACM.
Kaindl, H., Constantine, L., Karat, J., and Muller, M.J. (2001). Methods and modeling: Fiction or useful reality? (panel). In CHI 2001 Extended Abstracts. Seattle: ACM.
Lafrenière, D., Dayton, T., and Muller, M.J. (1999). Variations on a theme: Card-based methods in participatory analysis and design. Tutorial at CHI 99. Repeated at CHI 2000.
Millen, D.R., Fontaine, M., and Muller, M.J. (2002). Understanding the benefits and costs of communities of practice. Communications of the ACM.
Muller, M.J. (2000). Designing for and with a community of designers: Minority disciplines and communities of practice. Proceedings of PDC 2000.
Muller, M.J. (1999). Invisible work of telephone operators: An ethnocritical analysis. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (special issue on invisible work), 8(1-2), 31-61.
Muller, M.J. (2001). Layered participatory analysis: New developments in the CARD technique. In Proceedings of CHI 2001. Seattle: ACM.
Muller, M.J. (2003). Requirements specification (section introduction). In J. Jacko and A. Sears (eds.), Handbook of HCI. Mahway NJ USA: Erlbaum.
Muller, M.J., and Carey, K. (2002). Design as a minority discipline in a software company: Toward requirements for a community of practice. Proceedings of CHI 2002. Minneapolis MN USA: ACM.
Muller, M.J., Christiansen, E., Nardi, B., and Dray, S. (2001). Spiritual life and information technology: Do they intersect? Communications of the ACM.
Muller, M.J., Raven, M.E., Kogan, S., Millen, D.R., and Carey, K. (2003). Introducing chat into business organizations: Toward an instant messaging maturity model. In Proceedings of GROUP 2003. Sanibel Island FL USA: ACM.