Featured Researcher - Elizabeth Churchill

“People absolutely fascinate me,” Elizabeth Churchill exclaims. “I think this is because I’m a really nosy person.”

A psychologist by training, Churchill has devoted her career to studying people—especially how they adopt and adapt technologies into their everyday lives.

Since joining Yahoo! late last year as the lead of the Media Experience Research group, she has sought to gain a deeper understanding of how digital media fits into our daily existence—and what the online experience will look like three, five and ten years down the road.

Churchill says her fascination with human behavior began when she was 8 years old. That’s when her ex-pat parents returned to England after many years in India.

“I spent the first part of my childhood in India, and then overnight I was living a completely different kind of life back in England,” she explains. “It was a huge culture shock, but it set me off on this direction of thinking about how our environment—including our social, physical and even our technical environment—affects behavior.”

After earning her undergrad degree in psychology, Churchill worked in a mental health facility in England. She then received a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in Cognitive Science. For her thesis, she studied how people use reasoning and problem solving to learn complex interactive technologies.

So what attracted her to technology in the first place? “Technology is part of our everyday landscape,” Churchill says. “I feel like my computer and I collaborate—or don’t—to get stuff done. Technology is very much a place where a psychologist can feel at home. Not only is it very interesting to observe how we present ourselves to others and how sometimes we interact differently with person A online, compared with person B – but also being a psychologist means you always think about people when creating designs for new interactive technologies. And as it’s people who will be using them, that’s important!”

Prior to Yahoo!, she worked at Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto for more than seven years. Her research focused on the design, deployment and evaluation of technologies that facilitate human-to-human communication, coordination and collaboration. She then moved to the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where she studied how large corporations use workflow software and social networking technology to support their software engineering practice.

When Yahoo! Research came knocking, Churchill leapt at the opportunity. The company appealed to her on several levels. “First, it really provides the fabric for all kinds of different experiences,” she says. “You can use Yahoo! properties for your work, your social life, to sell your art, or shop for whatever you want. I’m very excited thinking about how these different properties are being collaged by people into their everyday life.”

Secondly, Churchill is intrigued by Yahoo!’s global reach. For instance, it’s now becoming evident that mobile will soon be the dominant form of access to the internet. Yet mobile devices such as cell phones are used very differently around the world. “If more people are accessing the internet through mobile, it’s important to understand what they will be doing and what their expectations will be,” explains Churchill. “In some cultures it’s acceptable to talk on cell phones in restaurants, and in others it’s not.”

Finally, Churchill loves Yahoo! because it’s a place where people go to have fun with technology. “My past research focused a lot on people at work, but here I’m studying how people interact with rich media for personal reasons too,” she says. “For instance, it’s amazing to see how people are mixing their photos and other media, and how families are basically creating their own histories.”

When it comes to having fun, Churchill can be found snowboarding in Tahoe almost every weekend in the winter. “I’m still not very good, but I’m obsessed with the sport,” she says. She still hasn’t discovered a summer sport, but is willing to try almost anything once. Her other passions include movies, shopping and photography.

And, of course, she loves people. “At the end of the day I don’t really care about the internet for itself,” she admits. “I care about the people, and Yahoo! is essentially all about the people.”