For trans people seeking gender-affirming surgery, there are barriers to accessing trustworthy information about procedures, surgeons, and the postoperative process. Trans-led online information sharing communities are essential tools for trans people seeking surgery, however, they rely on community knowledge that may not always be accessible, complete, or accurate. To understand how an online communication platform might support both surgeons and trans people seeking surgery, we conducted asynchronous online focus groups with 14 participants (ten trans community members and four gender-affirming surgeons). We found that gender-affirming surgeons and trans community members hold values in tensionvalues in alignment such as shared desires for information accuracy, transparency, and communication efficiency to support the surgical process. We contribute design implications for future online information sharing platforms that balance the needs of both trans patients and gender-affirming surgeons, including surgeon-verified information, surgeon anonymity, credential verification, searchable FAQs, and integrated community knowledge.

Personal health tracking has long been a topic of investigation in the HCI community. There is an emerging class of apps that support gender transition, which we term transition-tracking apps. However, little work has been done examining the use and impact of such apps. We aimed to address this gap by conducting an interview study with sixteen participants who are currently undergoing different forms of gender transition. We provide an understanding of transition tracking habits, the usage and potential of transition-tracking apps in the context of transition support technologies, and provide design suggestions and open areas of research.

Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias that involves seeking and prioritizing information that conforms to a pre-existing view or hypothesis that can negatively affect the decision-making process. We investigate the manifestation and mitigation of confirmation bias with an emphasis on the use of visualization. In a series of Amazon Mechanical Turk studies, participants selected evidence that supported or refuted a given hypothesis. We demonstrated the presence of confirmation bias and investigated the use of five simple visual representations, using color, positional, and length encodings for mitigating this bias. We found that at worst, visualization had no effect in the amount of confirmation bias present, and at best, it was successful in mitigating the bias. We discuss these results in light of factors that can complicate visual debiasing in non-experts.

Health and well-being are integral parts of the human experience, and yet due to numerous factors are inaccessible for many communities. The transgender community is no exception and faces increased risk for both physical and mental illness. This population faces many unique challenges before, during, and after transition. To gain a deeper understanding of the trans community’s health and well-being needs, we conducted twenty-one interviews with transgender individuals to determine how they navigated their identities and transitions. From our interviews, we examine and highlight the unique needs of the trans population with respect to health, well-being, identity, and transition. We discuss how designers can better understand and accommodate the diversity of this community, give suggestions for the design of technologies for trans health and well-being, and contribute open areas of research.

Review processes involve complex and often subjective decision-making tasks in which individual reviewers must read and rate submissions, such as a college application, along many relevant dimensions and typically with a rubric in mind. A common part of the work is committee review, where individual reviewers meet to discuss the merits of a particular submission in order to recommend an accept or reject decision. Prior work indicates that visualization and sensemaking support may be beneficial in such processes where reviewers must present the "story" of the applicant under question. We conducted a series of participatory design workshops with reviewers in the domain of holistic college admissions to better understand the challenges and opportunities regarding storytelling. Based on these workshops, we contribute a characterization for how reviewers in this domain construct visual stories, we provide guidance for designing for evidence capture and storytelling, and we draw parallels and distinctions between this domain and other reviewing domains.