Software as a Medium for Understanding Human Behavior

Our ability to understand users constrains our ability to design, create, and develop for them new ways of interfacing with technology. In turn, our ability to measure and derive insights from user behavior in real-world environments constrains our ability to truly understand them and how they will use the technology we develop for them. The psychological sciences (broadly defined) remain steadfastly locked in a tradition of experimental artifice—they make sense of our observations of humans by artificially constraining the environment (the laboratory) and human experience (experiments). However, the rate at which real-world endeavors are finding analogous virtualized platforms (e.g., entertainment, productivity, and sociality) is dramatically increasing; people are using software for more aspects of their lives than ever. This presents new measurement opportunities because software is a tool, and if we can instrument tools while they are used to perform tasks, then we can understand how humans approach those tasks. In this way, software is a new, virtualized medium for understanding real-human behavior in new compelling ways that bridge the gap between foundational research in the psychological science and applied research in the fields of human computer interaction (HCI). In this review paper, we will describe advances in gathering meaningful data from human in software environments and how it may be used to improve how people interface with their technology, understand cognition, as well as our understanding of people.