Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in students’ academic work, yet the increasing reliance can undermine learning depth and raise integrity concerns. While reflection has long been studied in HCI to foster awareness and behavior change, little is known about how to support students in reflecting on everyday LLM use. We present PromptMirror, a student-facing dashboard that processes LLM conversation logs and visualizes four perspectives, temporal, sentiment, intent, and thematic, to encourage reflection. We informed the design of PromptMirror with two focus groups (one expert and one student with four participants each) and subsequently conducted an online think-aloud with 20 university students who uploaded their own LLM use data. Findings provide preliminary evidence that PromptMirror may support students in recognizing their LLM use estimation gap and engaging in deeper reflection on LLM reliance. Our contributions are twofold: (1) a student-centric reflection system; (2) empirical insights into reflective analytics for everyday LLM tools.

In what ways do generative AI (GenAI) tools embedded in mainstream design software affect UI design practices and outcomes? In this study, we examine the use of FigmaAI, a GenAI feature within the industry-standard platform Figma. We conducted a within-subject study with 16 professional UX designers, each of whom completed two high-fidelity UI design tasks in a think-aloud session: one conventionally, without AI, and one with FigmaAI. We analyse the design process itself alongside experiences and reflections on using and not using AI, gathered from adjacent semi-structured interviews and post-task questionnaires. Our findings suggest that GenAI reshapes UI workflows, shifting them from additive to subtractive processes: designers refine AI drafts rather than building interfaces from scratch. While AI reduces workload and accelerates initial setup, it also constrains exploration, limits perceived ownership, and produces designs that are more visually and structurally similar.

Technology increasingly shapes our social interactions, both online and in person. Strong social connections and face-to-face interactions are vital for wellbeing, especially with close relationships. In this context, technology can play an ambivalent role: whereas it often has a negative impact on the quality of these interactions, it carries potential to enrich conversations and improve social interactions if used in a meaningful way. We design a prototype that implements subtle intervention strategies to foster meaningful technology use, specifically aimed at enhancing close relationships during in-person interactions. We evaluate the prototype within an exploratory, two-week in-the-wild user study with 6 tandems ( N =12). Our findings suggest that the strategy of "us-reflection" – a social approach to reflection – contributes to mutual awareness of participants’ shared time. Our prototype encouraged more meaningful interactions by proposing conversation topics or suggesting activities, ultimately strengthening close relationships and fostering more intentional, engaging, and rewarding social experiences.

Smartphone overuse is hyper-prevalent in society, and developing tools to prevent this overuse has become a focus of HCI. However, there is a lack of work investigating smartphone overuse interventions over the long term. We collected usage data from N = 1, 039 users of one sec over an average of 13.4 weeks and qualitative insights from 249 of the users through an online survey. We found that users overwhelmingly choose to target Social Media apps. We found that the short design frictions introduced by one sec effectively reduce how often users attempt to open target apps and lead to more intentional app-openings over time. Additionally, we found that users take periodic breaks from one sec interventions, and quickly rebound from a pattern of overuse when returning from breaks. Overall, we contribute findings from a longitudinal investigation of design frictions in the wild and identify usage patterns from real users in practice.

We present and evaluate the concept of winds – micro challenges to be done in the physical world post-smartphone overload, to encourage exiting the digital smartphone tunnel and promote refreshing breaks from the digital realm. Whereas digital detox solutions are unsustainable in everyday life, current everyday interventions such as screen time reminders or app blockers can induce negative feelings in users. We hypothesize that winds, delivered by our mobile app Real-World Wind (RWW), promote balance between the user’s physical and digital activities, as well as engagement with the intervention. RWW tracks users’ smartphone use behavior and distributes winds of five categories upon overload pattern detection. We evaluated the effectiveness of RWW in a week-long field study with 25 participants. Our findings show that winds foster a fun and engaging experience, and significantly promote balance between the digital and physical world post-smartphone overload. We discuss implications for future technology overload interventions.

Despite irreversibility being omnipresent in the lifeworld, research on interactions making use of irreversibility in computing systems is still in the early stages. User freedom – provided by the undo functionality – is considered to be a pillar of “usable” computer systems, overcoming irreversibility. Within this paper, we set up a thought experiment, challenging the “undo feature” and instead take advantage of irreversibility in the interaction with physical computing systems (tangibles, robots, etc). First, we present three material speculations, each inherently utilizing irreversibility. Second, we elaborate on the concept of irreversible interactions by contextualizing our work with critical HCI discourses and deducing three design strategies. Finally, we discuss irreversibility as a design element for self-reflection, meaningful acting, and a sustainable relationship with technology. While previously individual aspects of irreversibility have been explored, we contribute a comprehensive discussion of irreversible interactions in HCI presenting artifacts, a conceptualization, design strategies, and application purposes.

Smartphones provide various functions supporting users in their daily lives. However, the temptation of getting distracted and tuning out is high leading to so-called rabbit holes. To quantify rabbit hole behavior, we developed an Android tracking application that collects smartphone usage enriched with experience sampling questionnaires. We analyzed 14,395 smartphone use sessions from 21 participants, collected over two weeks, showing that rabbit hole sessions are significantly longer and contain more user interaction, revealing a certain level of restlessness in use. The context of rabbit hole sessions and subjective results revealed different triggers for spending more time on the phone. Next, we conduct an expert focus group (N=6) to put the gained insights into perspective and formulate a definition of the mobile phone rabbit hole. Our results form the foundation for predicting and communicating the mobile phone rabbit hole, especially when prolonged smartphone use results in regret.

We present MindPhone, a mindfulness-based intervention to tackle absentminded and excessive smartphone use. At unlock, MindPhone prompts one of two questions: what the user intends to do with the smartphone, or what the user intends to do in the real world after using their smartphone. Users may respond actively by writing, or passively by mentally reflecting. We evaluated the effectiveness of the two questions and two response modes in a mixed-method, 2x2 mixed field study with 28 participants over two weeks. Our results show that the real-world prompt significantly reduces absentminded use and encourages a quicker return to the real world, independent of the response mode. Asking about smartphone use intentions raises awareness of reasons for smartphone use. For everyday use of MindPhone, users wish to set the question and response mode based on context. We discuss including awareness of the physical world in future smartphone use interventions.

For most people, smartphones have become daily companions, offering ubiquitous information access and social communication. The majority of smartphone users sometimes feel distracted by their mobile devices and have experienced regretful smartphone use. The downsides of smartphone use have been widely explored by the literature. What is missing, however, is a suggestion of alternative activities users would like to perform instead of using their smartphone. We therefore conducted an online survey with N = 67 participants exploring users preferred activities alternative to regretful smartphone use for different time-frames. Our results show that usage sessions shorter than ten minutes are less prone to inducing a feeling of regret. Users’ concrete suggestions range from relaxation and self-care activities (10 to 20 minutes) to social and outdoor activities (more than 20 minutes) with a trend towards leisure activities rather than work-related ones. We finally provide impulses how to promote these activities through technology.

Internet memes are (multi)media pieces, found all across the world-wide-web. Often disposing of a humorous component, they express and reflect on all kinds of local and global phenomena. Within our work, we explore how people can use internet memes to express and reflect on themselves. We built MEMEory, a mobile meme journaling app. We evaluated the prospect of meme journaling, nicknamed ”memeing”, alongside a written diary in a 2-week field study with 31 participants. Opposed to more neutral chronicle-style text entries, our results suggest that participants used memes to express specific single, rather negative events and emotions throughout the day. When reflecting on daily events, the contained emotional and often humorous connotation of memes helped participants view negative events as more positive in retrospect. Although more difficult, memeing was perceived as significantly more motivating and enjoyable. Qualitative insights show that memeing can present a fun, engaging, expressive and memorable journaling experience.

Mindfulness is a term seen with increasing frequency in HCI literature, and yet the term itself is used almost as variously as the number of papers in which it appears. This diversity makes comparing or evaluating HCI approaches around mindfulness or understanding the design space itself a challenging task. We conducted a structured ACM literature search based on the term mindfulness. Our selection process yielded 38 relevant papers, which we analyzed for their definition, motivation, practice, evaluation and technology use around mindfulness. We identify similarities, divergences and areas of interest for each aspect, resulting in a framework composed of four perspectives and seven lines of research. We highlight challenges and opportunities for future HCI research and design.

Smartphones enable people to learn new languages whenever and wherever they want. This popularized mobile language learning apps (MLLAs) and in particular micro learning that offers simple and short learning units to keep the user on track. Due to the ubiquitous use of these applications, they have to adapt to the users' current situation to provide an optimal learning experience. To gain insights into how users perceive common usage scenarios, we conducted an online survey (N=74) and clustered all described learning scenarios into five categories of usage situations. We outlined internal and contextual factors which are characteristic for these situations and discussed those in a follow-up focus group with HCI experts (N=4). During this focus group, we collected four design recommendations to adapt MLLAs to situations of users' (a) high attention levels, (b) tiredness or exhaustion, (c) highly demanding environments, or (d) low motivation.