Homenet Overview:
Recent Results from a Field Trial of Residential Internet Use
Overview
As
with the telephone, radio, and television, the dramatic growth in household
computing has the potential to change how people live. Use of computers is
growing rapidly in homes. By 1993, a third of all
HomeNet is a field trial at
Research Questions
Our research program attempts to answer questions crucial to companies and government agencies developing advanced services:
What makes electronic services valuable? The success of electronic services will be based in part on their capabilities, their price, and the style with which they are operated. Our previous research has shown the crucial importance of offering services that allow people to communicate with each other and that connect them with a critical mass of people and information sources. Yet many crucial questions are still unanswered: What is the relative preference for communication, information, and entertainment among households of different types and among different members of a single household? How should electronic services integrate with each other and with non-electronic alternatives? What kinds of user interfaces will make the complex array of services easy and fun to use?
How can one predict consumer demand? New information services present problems in forecasting, because consumers are unlikely to understand the value they will receive without substantial experience. Moreover, because the value of the services will vary with the number of users and information suppliers, demand is likely to change over time. Detailed data about the use of communication, entertainment, and information services over time will allow us to develop, different models to predict drop out rates and use, and relate these to willingness to pay.
What impact will the services have in the household and the larger community? Like the telephone, the automobile, and the television, new electronic services may change patterns of communication and time use in households and in communities, which in turn will influence how the services are used and valued. Examining how these services fit into household routines and how these routines are changed by the services requires the longitudinal data that HomeNet supports.
Research Highlights
The Internet is too hard
Before participants in our sample had actually used the Internet, they reported positive attitudes towards the Internet but only vague ideas of what it would be good for. A large minority did not know what downloading or Email was. Given their vague beliefs and knowledge, it is probably not surprising that many had difficulty getting started. We expected that people with more computer skill and motivation would be likelier to overcome these difficulties, and would, in turn, be more likely to use the Internet frequently. However, we thought that as everyone learned how to use the computer and what the Internet could do for them, the influence of their initial computer skill would decline with time. We were wrong. Even after a year of experience with the Internet, participant's initial computer skill still constrained their Internet usage. This result held across different gender and age groups.
Over 70% of the households called the help desk. Calls to the help desk represented the behavior of some of the more sophisticated users. Less sophisticated users dropped out once they hit usability barriers. The kinds of problems logged by help desk staff included problems in installing phone service, configuring the telecommunication software, busy signals (users often blamed themselves!), buggy software, inexperience with mice, keyboards, scroll bars, terminology, radio buttons, and menus. Yet, in our home interviews, we noted there were many more problems participants had not called about. These included confusion using the Macintosh icons and features, trouble finding live sites on the Web with useful or fun information, and difficulties using Email.
Age, gender, and race predict Internet use, but family income doesn't.
Table 2 shows averages for various measures of Internet use, broken down by generation and gender. Teenagers are much heavier users of the Internet than their parents. Among teenagers, males are heavier users than females, while among adults, women were heavier users than men, especially for electronic mail. Although not shown in Table 1, whites were heavier users of the Internet than blacks, especially for electronic mail.
Internet Use Statistic AllSubgroupsTeenage boys Teenage girlsAdult menAdult
womenPercent of weeks logged in at least once Internet sessions Hours
connected to the Internet Session length (minutes) Electronic mail
messages sent Electronic
mail messages received Usenet newsgroups messages sent Usenet newsgroups
messages read Unique
World Wide Web sites visited Total N Winsorized N18328355367Table 1: Weekly
Internet use by different demographic groups.
Note: To compensate for skewed data, entries are Winsorized means, from the
middle 80% of the sample. The proportion logging in at least once was not Winsorized.
Niche and Mass Market Information Services Have Appeal.
Participants in the trial visited large numbers of Web sites, but the modal Web site appealed to only one percent of the sample. This finding implies that beyond a few highly popular services, people are looking for, and finding specific ("niche") services that match their particular interests. Figure 1 shows the distribution of web sites visited by different proportions of the sample during the first year of the trial. Of the 9,912 unique IP addresses visited, 55% were accessed by only a single individual and fewer than two percent of the sites were visited by even twenty percent of the sample.
Figure 1: Popularity of different WWW sites.
Interpersonal communications sustains Internet use
Currently, interpersonal communication via electronic mail and information acquisition via the World Wide Web are the dominant uses of the Internet. Email is a relatively mature technology (circa 1969). Compared to the Web, electronic mail is personalized, spontaneous, and interactive; the content of a particular message is usually tailored to the recipient and often takes into account their prior interactions. In contrast to Email, the World Wide Web is more analogous to broadcast media like billboards, magazines, or television. Information services on the Internet are generally posted in a public place and are available to anyone who happens by. They are minimally interactive. If their content is tailored at all, it is to broad audience characteristics, not to particular people.
For our sample, interpersonal communications via Email was both more popular and more sustaining than information acquisition via the Web. Participants used Email in at least 49% of their Internet sessions, but the Web in only 38% of them. Furthermore, during sessions in which participants accessed both their electronic mail and the Web, they accessed electronic mail first 75% of the time.
Moreover, time series analyses show that use of electronic mail is more stable over time than use of the Web. Participants who used electronic mail heavily in one week were very likely to use it heavily in a subsequent week. Web use was moderately stable, but substantially less so than Email use. Use of the Web during a week is partially driven by external events (like whether other family members are using during that week), while use of electronic mail is not. In contrast, use of electronic mail is driven by the availability of conversational partners. (For example, Email use drops during vacation periods, while Web use does not.)
Furthermore, Email seems to drive continued use of the Internet more than does the Web. That is, the people who were heavy electronic mail users one week were more likely to use the Internet for more hours in the subsequent week, even after controlling for the hours they logged onto the Internet during the previous week. In contrast, heavy Web use in one week reduces the number of hours that they spend the Internet in a subsequent week.
Figure 2: Influence of electronic mail use and World Wide Web use on subsequent Internet use
Finally, use of electronic mail rather than the Web leads to longer survival on the Internet. (See Figure 3.) That is, about 85% of people who used electronic mail more heavily than they used the Web were still using the Internet after a year'. In contrast, less than 70% of people who used the Web more heavily than they used electronic mail were still using the Internet after a year.
Figure 3 Influence of relative electronic mail use and World Wide Web use on Internet survival.
In summary, among the HomeNet sample, electronic mail use was more popular than use of the Web, more stable, and drove continued use of the Internet overall. One reason is that Email sustains ongoing dialogues and relationships. In contrast, the Web has more bounded properties, in whichinformation gathering, for example, for school assignments, purchase decisions, or paid employment is satisfied with one or a few visits. In the abstract sense, this is an argument that the Internet is a social and emotional technology, and that it sustains social networks.
HomeNet References
Research papers and other information on the HomeNet project are available at:
https://homenet.andrew.cmu.edu/progress/research.html.
Kiesler,
S., Kraut, R., Lundmark, V., Scherlis, W., & Mukhopadhyay, T. (1997, March
24-27) Usability, help desk calls, and residential Internet usage. Proceedings, Human Factors in Computing
Systems, CHI '97 (
Kraut, R. E. (1996, Dec.). Internet@home: Introduction to the special section on the new home computing. Communications of the ACM, 39, 32-35.
Kraut, R., Scherlis, W., Mukhopadhyay, T., Manning, J., & Kiesler, S. (1996, Dec.). The HomeNet field trial of residential Internet services. Communications of the ACM, 39, 55-63.
Kraut,
R. E., Scherlis, W, Mukhopadhyay, T., Manning, J., Kiesler, S. (1996). HomeNet:
A field trial of residential Internet services. Proceedings, Human Factors in Computing
Systems, CHI' 96. P284-291
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