Visualizations often encode multivariate data by mapping attributes to distinct visual channels such as color, size, or shape. The effectiveness of these encodings depends on separability--the extent to which channels can be perceived independently. Yet systematic evidence for separability, especially in map-based contexts, is lacking. We present a crowdsourced experiment that evaluates the separability of four channel pairs--color (ordered) x shape, color (ordered) x size, size x shape, and size x orientation--in the context of bivariate symbol maps. Both accuracy and speed analyses show that color x shape is the most separable and size x orientation the least separable, while size x color and size x shape do not differ. Separability also proved asymmetric--performance depended on which channel encoded the task-relevant variable, with color and shape outperforming size, and square shape especially difficult to discriminate. Our findings advance the empirical understanding of visual separability, with implications for multivariate map design.

Homophily refers to the tendency of individuals to associate with others who are similar to them in characteristics, such as, race, ethnicity, age, gender, or interests. In this paper, we investigate if individuals exhibit racial homophily when viewing visualizations, using mass shooting data in the United States as the example topic. We conducted a crowdsourced experiment (N=450) where each participant was shown a visualization displaying the counts of mass shooting victims, highlighting the counts for one of three racial groups (White, Black, or Hispanic). Participants were assigned to view visualizations highlighting their own race or a different race to assess the influence of racial concordance on changes in affect (emotion) and attitude towards gun control. While we did not find evidence of homophily, the results showed a significant negative shift in affect across all visualization conditions. Notably, political ideology significantly impacted changes in affect, with more liberal views correlating with a more negative affect change. Our findings underscore the complexity of reactions to mass shooting visualizations and suggest that future research should consider various methodological improvements to better assess homophily effects.

Working remotely from home during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant shifts and disruptions in the personal and work lives of millions of information workers and their teams. We examined how sleep patterns---an important component of mental and physical health---relates to teamwork. We used wearable sensing and daily questionnaires to examine sleep patterns, affect, and perceptions of teamwork in 71 information workers from 22 teams over a ten-week period. Participants reported delays in sleep onset and offset as well as longer sleep duration during the pandemic. A similar shift was found in work schedules, though total work hours did not change significantly. Surprisingly, we found that more sleep was negatively related to positive affect, perceptions of teamwork, and perceptions of team productivity. However, a greater misalignment in the sleep patterns of members in a team predicted positive affect and teamwork after accounting for individual differences in sleep preferences. A follow-up analysis of exit interviews with participants revealed team-working conventions and collaborative mindsets as prominent themes that might help explain some of the ways that misalignment in sleep can affect teamwork. We discuss implications of sleep and sleep misalignment in work-from-home contexts with an eye towards leveraging sleep data to facilitate remote teamwork.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of previously co-located information workers had to work from home, a trend expected to become much more commonplace in the future. We interviewed 53 information workers from 17 U.S. teams to understand how this unique extended work-from-home setting influenced teamwork and how they adapted to it. Using a grounded theory approach, we discovered that extended remote work highlighted diversity in team members' home-lives and daily work rhythms. Whereas these types of diversity played only marginal roles for teams in the co-located office, they had a more tangible impact in the work-from-home setting, from coordination delays and interruptions to conflicts related to workload fairness, miscommunication, and trust. Importantly, workers reported that their teams adapted to these challenges by setting explicit norms and standards for online communication and asynchronous collaboration and by promoting general social and situational awareness. We discuss computer-supported designs to help teams manage these latent diversities in an extended remote teamwork setting.

"What design innovations can the ubiquity and features of mobile devices bring to the programming realm?" has been a long-standing topic of interest within the human-computer interaction community. Yet, the important design considerations for using mobile devices in programming contexts have not been analyzed systematically. Towards this goal, we review a sample of the existing research work on this topic and present a design space covering (i) the target contexts for the designed programming tools, (ii) the types of programming functionality supported, and (iii) the key design decisions made to support the programming functionality on the mobile devices. We also review the design processes in the existing work and discuss objectives for future research with respect to (i) the trade-offs in enabling programming support given the constraints of mobile devices and (ii) applying human-centered methods particularly in the design and evaluation of programming tools on mobile devices.

Various stakeholders in the sports domain rely on the analysis and presentation of sports data to derive insights. In particular, sportswriters construct game stories using statistical information; fans share their viewpoints based on the real-time stats while watching the game. In this paper, we explore how these stakeholders construct data-driven sports stories. We began by observing a sportswriter, then analyzed published sports stories, and characterized 1500 fan comments about particular sporting events. We found that their story needs were similar in some respects while quite different in others. Based on the findings, we implemented two exploratory prototypes: GameViews-Writers for sportswriters to quickly extract key game information and GameViews-Fans to support a real-time data-driven game-viewing experience for fans. We report insights from two user studies conducted with four professional sportswriters and eight sports fans, respectively. We discuss the results of these studies and present several avenues for future work.

Although initial ideas for building intuitive and usable handwriting applications originated nearly 30 years ago, recent advances in stylus technology and handwriting recognition are now making handwriting a viable text-entry option on touchscreen devices. In this paper, we use modern methods to replicate studies form the 80's to elicit hand-drawn gestures from users for common text-editing tasks in order to determine a "guessable' gesture set and to determine if the early results still apply given the ubiquity of touchscreen devices today. We analyzed 360 gestures, performed with either the finger or stylus, from 20 participants for 18 tasks on a modern tablet device. Our findings indicate that the mental model of "writing on paper' found in past literature largely holds even today, although today's users' mental model also appears to support manipulating the paper elements as opposed to annotating. In addition, users prefer using the stylus to finger touch for text editing, and we found that manipulating "white space' is complex. We present our findings as well as a stylus-based, user-defined gesture set for text editing.

Holistic reviews are a common practice employed by universities in the USA to make admissions decisions. It is an individualized review process where reviewers assess an applicant's potential by considering various criteria including academic metrics, adversities faced, and personal attributes. While the factors considered in such reviews are broadly known, a detailed walk-through of the process is absent in existing literature. This is important to understand what is done in practice and to identify opportunities for technological interventions to support the complex and changing process. We employed cognitive task analysis and a socio-organizational approach to understand the holistic review process at a highly-selective, private university. We found the process to be nuanced and complex owing its complexity both to the numerous variables involved and the reviewers' thought processes. We present a rigorous, structured characterization of the review process and suggest possible leverage points for applying visualization decision-support tools.