TWEETSIGHT: ENHANCING FINANCIAL ANALYSTS' SOCIAL MEDIA USE
Open Access
- Author:
- Varanasi, Rama Adithya
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 21, 2017
- Committee Members:
- John M. Carroll, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Ben Hanrahan, Committee Member
Eun Kyoung Choe, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Social media
Financial analysts
design research
design
human computer interaction
sensemaking
work study - Abstract:
- Social media usage in corporate work environments has increased tremendously in the last few years. Recent studies have explored various purposes which social media serves in these environments. However, research is still limited in understanding how this technology is used in work activities; specially in the sensemaking process. Financial analysts are an important part of this corporate community. They utilize information from heterogeneous sources (for example corporate filings, economic indicators, news, and tweets) to generate unique trade ideas. This thesis seeks to understand the role of social media in their work activity; specifically, sensemaking process. For this purpose, I conducted a semi-structured interview and identified essential benefits and barriers for the primary social media platform used by the analysts - Twitter. Analysts use Twitter as a query exploration tool, as a bellwether to understand sentiment, and to gauge knock-on effects. However, there are few key problems which prevent an analyst from using Twitter to the fullest potential. Based on these problems, I developed four scenarios to guide the design of TweetSight. In my second study, I evaluated the design of TweetSight by walking analysts through the prototype. Analysts responded positively to anchoring contextual tweets in news articles to facilitate discovery and exploration of Twitter. My resultant findings and design implications can be applied more broadly in leveraging social media for various work activities, benefiting other corporate communities.