Critics have argued that mobile usability has largely been optimized, and that only incremental gains are possible. We set out to explore if the newest generation of design systems, which promote greater flexibility and a return to design basics, could produce substantially more usable designs while maintaining or increasing aesthetic judgments. Through a study with 48 diverse participants completing tasks in 10 different applications, we found that in designs created following Material 3 Expressive guidelines, users fixated on the correct screen element for a task 33% faster, completed tasks 20% faster, and rated experiences more positively compared to versions designed using the previous Material design system. These improvements in performance and aesthetic ratings challenge the premise of a usability plateau and show that mobile usability has not peaked. We illustrate specific opportunities to make mobile experiences more usable by returning to design fundamentals while highlighting risks of added flexibility.

Given the renewed attention on politics, values, and ethics within our field and the wider cultural milieu, now is the time to take stock of social justice research in HCI. We surveyed 124 papers explicitly pursuing social justice between 2009 and 2022 to better reflect on the current state of justice-oriented work within our discipline. We identified (1) how researchers understood the social justice-relevant harms and benefits, (2) the approaches researchers used to address harm, and (3) the tools that researchers leveraged to pursue justice. Our analysis highlights gaps in social justice work, such as the need for our community to conceptualize benefits, and identifies concrete steps the HCI community can take to pursue just futures. By providing a comprehensive overview of and reflection on HCI’s current social justice landscape, we seek to help our research community strategize, collaborate, and collectively act toward justice.

Data work is often completed by crowdworkers, who are routinely dehumanized, disempowered, and sidelined. We turn to citizen science to reimagine data work, highlighting collaborative relationships between citizen science project managers and volunteers. Though citizen science and traditional crowd work entail similar forms of data work, such as classifying or transcribing large data sets, citizen science relies on volunteer contributions rather than paid data work. We detail the work citizen science project managers did to shape volunteer experiences: aligning science goals, minimizing barriers to participation, engaging communities, communicating with volunteers, providing training and education, rewarding contributions, and reflecting on volunteer work. These management strategies created opportunities for meaningful work by cultivating intrinsic motivation and fostering collaborative work relationships but ultimately limited participation to specific data-related tasks. We recommend management tactics and task design strategies for creating meaningful work for "invisible collar" workers, an understudied class of labor in CSCW.

With rapid advances in computing, we are beginning to see the expansion of technology into domains far afield from traditional office settings historically at the center of CSCW research. Manufacturing is one industry undergoing a new phase of digital transformation. Shop-floor workers are being equipped with tools to deliver efficiency and support data-driven decision making. To understand how these kinds of technologies are affecting the nature of work, we conducted a 15-month qualitative study of the digitalization of the shipping and receiving department at a small manufacturer located in the Southeastern United States. Our findings provide an in-depth understanding of how the norms and values of factory floor workers shape their perception and adoption of computing services designed to augment their work. We highlight how emerging technologies are creating a new class of hybrid workers and point to the social and human elements that need to be considered to preserve meaningful work for blue-collar professionals.

Manufacturing workplaces are becoming sites of intense change as technologies like IoT and AR/VR are beginning to make deep inroads into how complex products are engi-neered and assembled. These categories of technologies are becoming prominent in manufacturing because they offer potential solutions to the problems of unskilled labor and workforce shortages. Technology has the potential to shift manufacturing in both large and small ways, to better un-derstand how a manufacturing organization might appropri-ate VR, we ran a study with a global aviation manufacturer headquartered the United States. To document the changing nature of work via this class of technologies we conducted a VR study which facilitated access to participant observation and interviews (n=21). Our findings provide initial insights into the organizational impact of VR on human perfor-mance augmentation and skill acquisition revealing the larger infrastructural challenges facing the adoption of con-sumer grade smart technologies in industrial workplace settings.

The impact of computing devices on the nature of work has been a long-standing topic of inquiry. Removing the boundaries of traditional corporate organizations, mobile IoT has enabled a technology driven future, taking trans-formative technology off the desk and placing it in the field. The exponential increase in mobility and reduction in cost have expanded accessibility of computing technologies to whole new categories of work including emergency re-sponse. As new kinds of workplaces adopt and adapt to computing, we want to better understand how these tech-nologies impact the organization and change the types of work people do. In order to answer those questions, we present a qualitative investigation examining the implemen-tation of a wearable device into two fire departments in the Southeastern United States. Our analysis demonstrates how the particulars of these kinds of workplaces and organiza-tions will shape how we design new digital technologies for the next generation workforce.