One’s profession is an essential part of modern life. Traditionally, professional development has been criticized for excluding people with disabilities. People with visual impairments, for example, face disproportionately low employment rates, highlighting persistent gaps in professional opportunities. Recently, there has been growing research on social media platforms as spaces for more equitable career development approaches. In this paper, we present an interview study on the professional development experiences of 60 people with visual impairments on TikTok (also known as “BlindTokers”). We report BlindTokers’ goals, strategies, and challenges, supported by detailed examples and in-depth analysis. Based on the findings, we identified that BlindTokers’ practices reveal an alternative professional development approach that is more flexible, inclusive, personalized, and diversified than traditional models. Our study also extends professional development research by foregrounding emerging digital skills and proposing design implications to foster more equitable and inclusive professional opportunities.

Mental health care-seeking among marginalized young adults has received limited attention in CSCW research. Through in-depth interviews and visual elicitation methods with 18 diverse U.S. participants, our study reveals how marginalized identities shape mental health care-seeking journeys, often characterized by low aspirations and passive care-seeking influenced by lived experiences of marginalization. However, we found the transformative function of '' care encounters ''-serendipitous interactions with mental health resources that occur when individuals are not actively seeking support. These encounters serve as critical turning points, catalyzing shifts in aspiration and enabling more proactive care-seeking behaviors. Our analysis identifies both the infrastructural conditions that enable transformative care encounters and the aspiration breakdowns that impede care-seeking processes. This work makes conceptual contributions by supplementing traditional motivation-based care-seeking models with a reconceptualization of ''care encounters'' that accounts for the infrastructural and serendipitous nature of mental health access. We advance understanding of how marginalized identity uniquely influences care-seeking behaviors while providing actionable design implications for embedding technology-mediated ''care encounters'' into socio-technical interventions that can better support mental health care access for vulnerable populations.

Enhancing emotional well-being has become an important focus in HCI and CSCW, with technologies and AI increasingly designed to track, manage, and regulate emotions. However, these approaches have faced criticism for potentially suppressing certain emotional experiences. Through a scoping review of 53 empirical studies from ACM proceedings implementing Technology-Mediated Emotion Intervention (TMEI), we examine current practices through lenses from HCI critical theories. Our analysis reveals emotion intervention mechanisms that extend beyond ''emotion regulation'' paradigms, identifying care-centered goals that prioritize non-judgmental emotional support and preserve users' identities. The findings demonstrate how researchers design technologies to generate artificial care, intervene in power dynamics, and nudge behavioral changes. By grounding our review in critical HCI scholarship, we contribute the concept of '' emotion support '' as an alternative approach to ''emotion regulation,'' emphasizing human-centered approaches to emotional well-being. This work advances the understanding of diverse human emotional needs beyond individualistic and cognitive perspectives, offering design implications that critically reimagine how artificial intelligence systems can honor emotional complexity, curate spaces for bad feelings, preserve human agency, and transform power dynamics in care contexts.

Many people now watch health videos, such as diet, exercise, mental health, COVID-19, and chronic disease videos, on social media. Most existing studies focused on video creators, leaving the motivations and practices of viewers underexplored. We interviewed 18 participants, surveyed 121 respondents, and derived a model characterizing consumers' video consumption practices on social media. The practices include five main activities: deciding to watch videos driven by various motivations, accessing videos on social media through a socio-technical ecosystem, watching videos to meet informational, emotional, and entertainment needs, evaluating the credibility and interestingness of videos, and using videos to achieve health goals. Through an iterative video consumption process, individuals strategically navigate across multiple platforms, seeking better accessibility, higher reliability, and cultivating a stronger motivation. They actively look for longer and more in-depth videos. We further identified challenges consumers face while consuming health videos on social media and discussed design implications and directions for future research.

Accessing quality information is becoming increasingly important, given the amount of information on the Internet and the exponential growth of misinformation. Information retrieval research tends to focus on conceptualizing and measuring the concept of relevance and synthesizing research on how users perceive and judge the relevance of information. Comparatively, less attention has been paid to information quality and the synthesis of research on how quality is perceived and judged by information consumers. As an initial effort to bridge the gap, we reviewed the literature concerning information quality on the topic of consumer health information seeking. We included literature on three intertwined concepts – credibility, trust, and quality – which more or less convey the notion of the quality of information. We collected the definitions and measures of the three concepts and identified their overlaps and differences. We further classified the dimensions of these concepts based on an existing hierarchical taxonomy of data quality. We found that the three concepts shared a core set of dimensions: credibility, trustworthiness, objectivity, accuracy, reliability, currency, and recommendations to friends. However, they had different scopes and differed in notable ways. Credibility and trust emphasize the intrinsic features of information, source, or system followed by their relations to users’ feelings, whereas quality emphasizes information or system’s fitness with tasks at hand followed by the intrinsic features of information or system. The results call for more explicit definitions of these concepts in empirical research and greater efforts to theorize users’ perceptions of information quality in increasingly complex and opaque information systems. Such work precedes the design of effective, user-centered, and ethical information systems.

Abstract Evaluating the quality of online health information (OHI) is a major challenge facing consumers. We designed PageGraph, an interface that displays quality indicators and associated values for a webpage, based on credibility evaluation models, the nudge theory, and existing empirical research concerning professionals' and consumers' evaluation of OHI quality. A qualitative evaluation of the interface with 16 participants revealed that PageGraph rendered the information and presentation nudges as intended. It provided the participants with easier access to quality indicators, encouraged fresh angles to assess information credibility, provided an evaluation framework, and encouraged validation of initial judgments. We then conducted a quantitative evaluation of the interface involving 60 participants using a between‐subject experimental design. The control group used a regular web browser and evaluated the credibility of 12 preselected webpages, whereas the experimental group evaluated the same webpages with the assistance of PageGraph. PageGraph did not significantly influence participants' evaluation results. The results may be attributed to the insufficiency of the saliency and structure of the nudges implemented and the webpage stimuli's lack of sensitivity to the intervention. Future directions for applying nudges to support OHI evaluation were discussed.