User Profile

I'm Aviva W. Rosenstein. I've been an interaction researcher for more than a decade, and have been studying interaction on the WWW since the earliest days of the protocol. At the moment, I'm defining interaction research as "an interdisciplinary inquiry into the process of message exchange between people with a focus on interaction mediated by communication technologies, or between people and their technologic agents." But basically it's all about intentional communication between human beings, regardless of the communication context.

I got into this field around 1991, mostly because I was interested in the interpersonal implications of new communication technologies. I ended up studying and teaching the social impact of the WWW, interactive system design, interface and interaction theory.

My academic home for years was the ACTLab -- a somewhat persistent and somewhat autonomous zone founded by Sandy Stone at the University of Texas at Austin. The ACTlab provides a home for people interested in the the place where technology, art and culture come together and make things happen. I moved to the bay area during the dot.com bubble years, and pursued a career in user research as soon as the ink was dry on my dissertation. You can check my LinkedIn profile for those details.

Currently I'm a Director of Customer Insights at Yahoo! Inc. Due to the size of its audience and the range of its products and services, Yahoo! is an incredibly rich place to study interaction at close range. Being an interdisciplinary researcher with a great deal of curiosity (or perhaps just a short attention span), I've gotten to work closely on everything from search, photo sharing, e-commerce, financial services, and a variety of online media delivery systems.

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