While users can choose to abandon technologies, there is a need to better understand why and how they negotiate continued use, especially when persistence can be psychologically costly. As growing evidence suggests that dating app users persist despite negative impacts to their mental health and well-being, we explore the digital dating context as a rich site to explicate the process of “staying.” Drawing on interviews with 15 dating app users, we provide an empirical account of staying that illustrates how affective and adaptive dynamics work together to sustain cyclical engagement. We find that oscillating affective patterns shape how users interpret and re-enter dating app use over time while three clusters of adaptive practices help regulate participation and manage these affective patterns. We then unpack our findings through cruel optimism, foreground hope as a key affective experience, and argue that design alone is insufficient to address the structural conditions of staying.

As more people turn to chatbots for socioemotional support—often termed psychosocial AI—the stakes of understanding these interactions grow. Psychosocial AI might foster healthier human-human relationships—and also might exacerbate loneliness, abuse, and self-harm. We provide an empirical account of one less-studied facet: seeking AI advice on sex, dating, and relationships with other people. We recruited 25 people who use AI for relationship advice to a questionnaire, collecting 90 prompts illustrating their practices. Interviews with 17 further explored how they navigate AI’s limitations to achieve intimacy goals. Our findings detail (1) the roles that users imagine for AI in relationship advice; (2) how users navigate risks like sycophancy and overreliance to attain relational benefits; and (3) the folk theories users hold and the prompting tactics they employ to overcome AI’s limitations. We close with recommendations for human-AI interaction, AI safety, and sociotechnical research, towards AI that supports healthier digital intimacies.

People with multiple chronic conditions (MCC) need support to identify and articulate how their personal values relate to their health. We drew on previous research involving people with MCC to develop three prototypes for supporting reflection on relationships between values and health. We tested these prototypes in a qualitative study involving 12 people with MCC. We identified benefits and limitations to building on patients' existing visit-preparation practices; revealed varying levels of comfort with deep, exploratory reflection involving a facilitator; and found that reflection oriented toward the future could elicit hopeful attitudes and plans for change, while reflection on the past elicited strong resistance. We discuss these findings in relation to previous literature on designing for reflection in three areas: shifting between self-guided and facilitator-guided reflection, balancing between outcome-oriented and exploratory reflection, and exploring temporality in reflection.

Human-computer interaction has a long history of working with marginalized people. We sought to understand how HCI researchers navigate work that engages with marginalized people and considerations researchers might work through to expand benefits and mitigate potential harms. In total, 24 HCI researchers, located primarily in the United States, participated in an interview, survey, or both. Through a reflexive thematic analysis, we identified four tensions—exploitation, membership, disclosure, and allyship. We explore the complexity involved in each, demonstrating that an equitable endpoint may not be possible, but this work is still worth pursuing when researchers make certain considerations. We emphasize that researchers who work with marginalized people should account for each tension in their research approaches to move forward. Finally, we propose an allyship-oriented approach to research that draws inspiration from discourse occurring in tangential fields and activist spaces and pushes the field into a new paradigm of research with marginalized people.

Transgender and gender-diverse youth deserve proper sex education, but current educational and clinical structures largely ignore their developmental experiences. As a result, many of these teens go online to seek crucial information. Designers and researchers alike can benefit from an understanding of the design needs of gender-diverse youth for sex education online resources. We recruited 19 gender-diverse youth, ages 15 to 21, to participate in a mix of in-person and online design methods. This research makes three contributions; 1) identification of preferences for where gender-diverse teens prefer to get certain kinds of sexual health information, 2) design considerations for an online resource, 3a) a new method for eliciting preferences, the Four Corners Exercise, and 3b) a new method for combining the Asynchronous Remote Community (ARC) method with in-person sessions. Through this research, we provide key considerations in developing an online sex education resource for gender-diverse youth.

Collaborations increasingly draw on personal data. We examine personal-data-supported collaborations in a high stakes, high-performance environment: collegiate sports. We conducted 22 interviews with people from four common roles within collegiate sports teams: athletes, sport coaches, athletic trainers, and strength and conditioning coaches. Using boundary negotiating artifacts as a lens for analysis, we describe an ecology of personal data in collaborations among these four roles. We use this ecology to highlight tensions and foreground issues of power asymmetry in these collaborations. To characterize these power asymmetries in the collaborative use of personal data, we propose an extension of boundary negotiating artifacts: extraction artifacts.

Teenagers have unique needs for mental wellbeing that can be supported by interactive technologies. Teens also have valuable input in the design of technology, so designers and researchers must seek new methods for involving them in the design process. We enrolled 23 unacquainted teenagers in an Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) study consisting of two private online groups. Teens participated in 10 weekly design activities on stress management across three months. We found that teens sought support from technology tailored to their perception of control in stressful contexts, developing sense of self, and varying social needs, including asking for no intervention from others. Teens appreciated that the ARC design experience allowed for flexibility in participation and supported selective disclosure. However, there were limited interactions between teenagers online. Reflecting on our study, we provide design implications for tools to support teenager mental health and discuss how the ARC method can be adapted for designing with teenagers.