Buddy Post

My Buddy is Ravi, and his blog is located here:  http://cs303blog.blogspot.com/

The information you’ve gathered on the psychological reasons and nature behind procrastination was really interesting to me. I personally can completely relate to the findings that more choices or more difficult tasks can induce the most procrastination.  I really like that your hypothesis is clean, concise, and easily testable – which my hypothesis is sorely missing right now. 

Some feedback on your experimental design as listed: I see for each time a user goes to a greenlisted site, you are measuring if it has latency added, and if the user closes the tab or goes to another tab before the tab loads, and then recording the length of the users visit to that tab. I can see some potential areas of concern in the going to different tabs, and in the length of users visit. The length of a user visit to any website, including a procrastination website, can depend heavily on many factors completely outside your study, such as the users mood, time of day, how much time they have, how many other things they need to do, outside interruptions / stimuli, and even how much new page content there is on the site since they last checked. So I don’t know how accurate recording how long someone is on a site would be between the two conditions. For measuring if the latency prompted users to go to other tabs to wait for it to load, I feel like something like this could be very dependent on user preference. Personally, if a site I am trying to go to is taking more than a few seconds to load, I will automatically go to another tab and do another short task, and then go back to the tab in a few seconds or minutes to check that it loaded and use it. This changing of tabs doesn’t mean I won’t go to that site, it just means I go to a different site (often a different procrastination site even) while waiting for it to load. This could even result in more procrastination…if the user opts to open two sites because one is too slow.

Also, what will you do about sites like facebook, which auto-update periodically if they are left open. Many people I know browse facebook using the feeds, and just leave facebook open all the time and just tab back to it to check any new stuff in the feed. Will this type of browsing behavior still be recorded in your study? Or are you not allowing users to keep tabs to multiple procrastination sites open at the same time as a control for this? 

One possible modification to your experiment to get around some of these issues is to maybe use the rate at which users go to procrastination sites / how many they go to in the time period, and couple this with giving different users different rates of adding in the latency or not – and see if the rate of adding in latency has any correlation with rate of going to procrastination sites. But this still does have the issue of you needing to measure a baseline for each person of how often they go to these types of sites normally. Even though procrastination varies greatly week to week, maybe if you measure long enough and collect a lot of data you can get around the weekly variations. 

Your project is looking great and I am excited to see the results. Hopefully you can cure the procrastinator in us all!