AI-initiated clarification questions have been shown to improve output quality, yet little is known about how they reshape user experience across task applications such as text and image generation. We compared three strategies, No Questions, Ask First, and Ask After, across text and image tasks with 30 participants using post-task surveys and interviews. We evaluated three UX dimensions: cognitive overhead, verification burden, and trust and reliability. Our results show that clarification consistently increased users’ trust and confidence when evaluating AI outputs, while also increasing cognitive effort. Rather than experiencing this added effort as friction, participants often described clarification as a thinking scaffold that helped them articulate goals and reflect on their intent. Timing alone (Ask First vs. Ask After) produced limited UX differences, although Ask After yielded higher trust in text tasks. Qualitative findings suggest that the value of clarification increases in tasks with greater uncertainty and output irreversibility.

Online interpersonal harm, such as cyberbullying and sexual harassment, remains a pervasive issue on social media platforms. Traditional approaches, primarily content moderation, often overlook survivors' needs and agency. We introduce SnuggleSense, a system that empowers survivors through structured sensemaking. Inspired by restorative justice practices, SnuggleSense guides survivors through reflective questions, offers personalized recommendations from similar survivors, and visualizes plans using interactive sticky notes. A controlled experiment demonstrates that SnuggleSense significantly enhances sensemaking compared to an unstructured process of making sense of the harm. We argue that SnuggleSense fosters community awareness, cultivates a supportive survivor network, and promotes a restorative justice-oriented approach toward restoration and healing. We also discuss design insights, such as tailoring informational support and providing guidance while preserving survivors' agency.

Consumers increasingly interact with workers through technology-mediated marketplaces (TMMs)—environments where third-party companies manage interactions, control information, and constrain behavioral choices. We argue that opacity in how TMMs operate can make it difficult for consumers to judge what is fair when interacting with other economic actors. To better understand how consumers perceive and act on fairness in TMMs, we examine the practice of tipping—a consumer behavior in the United States that is strongly associated with assessments of fairness. Through interviews with consumers, we find three distinct ways that consumers discuss fairness in tipping in third-party food delivery: fairness as supporting a living wage, fairness as reciprocity, and fairness in distribution of payments. We discuss how TMMs codify economic interactions and change consumers’ social meaning of a tip, how consumers perceive an obligation to tip drivers differently in TMMs, and how TMMs alter information consumers use to determine accountability.

Online harm is a prevalent issue in adolescents’ online lives. Restorative justice teaches us to focus on those who have been harmed, ask what their needs are, and engage in the offending party and community members to collectively address the harm. In this research, we conducted interviews and design activities with harmed adolescents to understand their needs to address online harm. They also identified the key stakeholders relevant to their needs, the desired outcomes, and the preferred timing to achieve them. We identified five central needs of harmed adolescents: sensemaking, emotional support and validation, safety, retribution, and transformation. We find that addressing the needs of those who are harmed online usually requires concerted efforts from multiple stakeholders online and offline. We conclude by discussing how platforms can implement design interventions to meet some of these needs.

Algorithms engineered to leverage rich behavioral and biometric data to predict individual attributes and actions continue to permeate public and private life. A fundamental risk may emerge from misconceptions about the sensitivity of such data, as well as the agency of individuals to protect their privacy when fine-grained (and possibly involuntary) behavior is tracked. In this work, we examine how individuals adjust their behavior when incentivized to avoid the algorithmic prediction of their intent. We present results from a virtual reality task in which gaze, movement, and other physiological signals are tracked. Participants are asked to decide which card to select without an algorithmic adversary anticipating their choice. We find that while participants use a variety of strategies, data collected remains highly predictive of choice (80% accuracy). Additionally, a significant portion of participants became more predictable despite efforts to obfuscate, possibly indicating mistaken priors about the dynamics of algorithmic prediction.

How do people come to believe conspiracy theories, and what role does the internet play in this process as a socio-technical system? We explore these questions by examining online participants in the "chemtrails" conspiracy, the idea that visible condensation trails behind airliners are deliberately sprayed for nefarious purposes. We apply Weick's theory of sensemaking to examine the role of people's frames (beliefs and worldviews), as well as the socio-technical contexts (social interactions and technological affordances) for processing informational cues about the conspiracy. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with thirteen believers and seven ex-believers, we find that many people become curious about chemtrails after consuming rich online media, and they later find welcoming online communities to support shared beliefs and worldviews. We discuss how the socio-technical context of the internet may inadvertently trap people in a perpetual state of ambiguity that becomes reinforced through a collective sensemaking process. In addition, we show how the conspiracy offers a way for believers to express their dissatisfaction with authority, enjoy a sense of community, and find some entertainment along the way. Finally, we discuss how people's frames and the various socio-technical contexts of the internet are important in the sensemaking of debunking evidence, and how such factors may function in the rejection of conspiratorial beliefs.

Biosensors-devices that sense the human body-are increasingly ubiquitous. However, it is unclear how people evaluate the risks associated with their use, in part because it is not well-understood what people believe these sensors can reveal. In this study, participants ranked biosensors by how likely they are to reveal what a person is thinking and feeling. We report quantitative and qualitative results of two survey-based studies, one on Mechanical Turk workers (n=100), and one on participants in a longitudinal self-tracking study (n=100). Our findings imply that, in the absence of information about particular sensing technologies, people rely on existing beliefs about the body to explain what they might reveal. Highlighting mismatches between perceived and actual technical capabilities, we contribute recommendations for designers and users.

Maintaining participation beyond the initial period of engagement is critical for peer production systems. Theory suggests that an increase in motivation is expected with contributors' movement from the community periphery to the core. Less is known, however, about how specific motivations change over time. We fill this gap by focusing on individual motivational paths in the formative periods of engagement, exploring which motivations change and how. We collected data on various instrumental and non-instrumental motivations at two points in study participants? Wikipedia career: when they started editing and again after six months. We found that non-instrumental motivations (including collective and intrinsic motives) decreased significantly over time, in contrast with socially-driven motivations such as norm-oriented motivates which did not change and social motives which increased marginally. The findings offer new insights into newcomers' evolving motivations, with implications for designing and managing peer-production systems.

Research on peer-production suggests that as participants choose what actions to perform, prototypical activity patterns emerge. Recent work characterized these patterns and demonstrated that informal emergent roles are highly stable. Nonetheless, we know little about the ways in which contributors take on and shed emergent roles. The objectives of this study are to: (a) delineate the temporal dynamics of participants' emergent role taking behaviors, and (b) identify the motivations driving role-transition behaviors. Our study links motivation to role-transition behaviors within Wikipedia. Our first sample covered eleven years and 222,119 contributors, and was used to identify four categories of temporal role-taking behaviors, that differ in their mobility between emergent roles and across Wikipedia articles. Our second examination linked the motivations of 175 new participants to their subsequent role-taking activity over 14 months. Together, the two analyses reveal that role-taking categories can be distinguished based on participants' motivational orientation (intrinsic/extrinsic and self/others-oriented).

This study examines heartrate sharing in the context of a trust-building game. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses, we find that "elevated" (versus "normal") heartrate of an exchange partner is associated with negative mood attributions and reduced cooperation in a social dilemma game. To investigate how specific our findings are to heartrate (as opposed to some other "elevated" signal collected from the body), we replicate our initial experiment with an unfamiliar biosignal, "skin reflectivity". We find that both heartrate and the unfamiliar biosignal are associated with negative mood attributions, but we observe a decrease in cooperative behavior only with elevated heartrate. Qualitative results indicate that individuals may learn an association between our unfamiliar biosignal and the cooperative, trusting behavior of their partner. Our findings highlight the role prior beliefs can play in shaping interpretations of a biosignal, while suggesting that designers can, perhaps inadvertently, train users to associate signals with social meanings. We discuss implications for how wearable sensors can mediate social interactions.

We introduce Inquire, a tool designed to enable qualitative exploration of utterances in social media and large-scale texts. As opposed to keyword search, Inquire allows the effective use of sentences as queries to quickly explore millions of documents to retrieve semantically-similar sentences. We apply Inquire to LiveJournal.com (LJ) database, which contains millions of personal diaries, and we use semantic embeddings trained in LJ or Google News (GN) datasets. We present the system design through iterative evaluations with qualitative researchers. We show how queries become a part of the inductive process, enabling researchers to try multiple ideas while gaining intuition and discovering less-obvious insights. We discuss the choice of LJ as a rich source of public posts, the preference for GN embeddings which link formal language (e.g. "reminiscence triggers") with colloquial expressions (e.g. "music brings back memories"), the interplay between tool and user, and potential qualitative and social research opportunities.

Peer production communities often struggle to retain contributors beyond initial engagement. This may be a result of contributors' level of motivation, as it is deeply intertwined with activity. Existing studies on participation focus on activity dynamics but overlook the accompanied changes in motivation. To fill this gap, this study examines the interplay between contributors' fun motives and activity over time. We combine motivational data from two surveys of Wikipedia newcomers with data of two periods of editing activity. We find that persistence in editing is related to fun, while the amount of editing is not: individuals who persist in editing are characterized by higher fun motives early on (when compared to dropouts), though their motives are not related to the number of edits made. Moreover, we found that newcomers' experience of fun was reinforced by their amount of activity over time: editors who were initially motivated by fun entered a virtuous cycle, whereas those who initially had low fun motives entered a vicious cycle. Our findings shed new light on the importance of early experiences and reveal that the relationship between motivation and participation levels is more complex than previously understood.

We examine how financial assurance structures and the clearly defined financial transaction at the core of monetized network hospitality reduce uncertainty for Airbnb hosts and guests. We apply the principles of social exchange and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to a qualitative study of Airbnb hosts to 1) describe activities that are facilitated by the peer-to-peer exchange platform and 2) how the assurance of the initial financial exchange facilitates additional social exchanges between hosts and guests. The study illustrates that the financial benefits of hosting do not necessarily crowd out intrinsic motivations for hosting but instead strengthen them and even act as a gateway to further social exchange and interpersonal interaction. We describe the assurance structures in networked peer-to-peer exchange, and explain how such assurances can reconcile contention between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. We conclude with implications for design and future research.

We investigate interpretations of a biosignal (heartrate) in uncertain social interactions. We describe the quantitative and qualitative results of a randomized vignette experiment in which subjects were asked to make assessments about an acquaintance based on an imagined scenario that included shared heartrate information. We compare the results of this experiment in adversarial and non-adversarial contexts of interaction. We find that elevated heartrate transmits cues about mood in both contexts, but that these cues do not appear to impact assessments of trustworthiness, reliability and dependability. Counter to our expectations, we find that normal (rather than elevated) heartrate leads to negative trust-related assessments, but only in an adversarial context. Our qualitative analysis points to the role of social expectations in shaping contextual interpretations of heartrate, and reveals individual differences in the way interpretations are constructed. We unpack some of the ways that social meanings can arise from biosensor data, and discuss considerations for those designing interactions with wearables.

The recruitment of participants for online survey research presents many challenges. In this work, we present four experiments examining how two different kinds of "surprise" financial incentives affect the rate of participation in a longitudinal study when participants are initially solicited with either an appeal to intrinsic motivation to participate in research or one that also offers extrinsic financial incentives. We find that unexpected financial incentives ("existence surprises") presented to people who click a recruitment advertisement focused on intrinsic incentives lead to a lower recruitment rate than do the same incentives offered to those who clicked an advertisement that led them to expect it. However, when potential participants expect a financial incentive, surprising them with a higher amount ("amount surprises") yields a higher recruitment rate. We interpret these results in the context of crowding theory. Neither type of surprise affected ongoing participation, measured as the number of questions and questionnaires completed over the course of the study.

Many existing and emerging online systems allow people to share content and coordinate the exchange of goods and favors in local geographic settings. We present a qualitative case study of user experiences concerning exchange and reciprocity in local online exchange. Findings from eleven in-depth interviews (containing forty-nine separate exchange experiences) reveal an aversion to indebtedness and several user behaviors that lessen these negative feelings: (1) offering small tokens of appreciation to exchange partners, (2) understanding and accepting the indirect nature of generalized exchange, (3) managing expectations by framing offers and requests carefully, (4) minimizing efforts needed in exchange processes, and (5) bartering and exchanging for a third party. The paper contributes to our understanding of emergent behaviors and norms in local online exchange systems. We discuss design implications from these empirical insights that can help alleviate the discomfort of indebtedness and better encourage and sustain participation in systems of indirect reciprocity.

The power-law distribution of participation characterizes a wide variety of technology-mediated social participation (TMSP) systems, and Wikipedia is no exception. A minority of active contributors does most of the work. While the existence of a core of highly active contributors is well documented, how those individuals came to be so active is less well understood. In this study we extend prior research on TMSP and Wikipedia by examining in detail the characteristics of the revisions that new contributors make. In particular we focus on new users who maintain a minimum level of sustained activity during their first six months. We use content analysis of individual revisions as well as other quantitative techniques to examine three research questions regarding the effect of early diversification of activity, nature vs. nurture, and associations with later administrative and organizational activity. We present analyses that address each of these questions, and conclude with implications for our understanding of the progression of participation on Wikipedia and other TMSP systems.

The success of Wikipedia as a large-scale collaborative effort has spurred researchers to examine the motivations and behaviors of Wikipedia's participants. However, this research has tended to focus on active involvement rather than more common forms of participation such as reading. In this paper we argue that Wikipedia's readers should not all be characterized as free-riders -- individuals who knowingly choose to take advantage of others' effort. Furthermore, we illustrate how readers provide a valuable service to Wikipedia. Finally, we use the notion of legitimate peripheral participation to argue that reading is a gateway activity through which newcomers learn about Wikipedia. We find support for our arguments in the results of a survey of Wikipedia usage and knowledge. Implications for future research and design are discussed.

This paper focuses on online gift exchange in a setting where online and offline interactions are tightly intertwined and most of the exchanges require face-to-face interaction to be completed. We present a local online gift exchange system, Kassi, and a seven-month case study of its use. Based on survey material and logs of system usage, we analyze users' motivations to contribute to the system and the community. While most users held favorable attitudes towards the system, many reasons for not using the service were found. We set our findings into perspective by discussing different ways of defining participation, measuring use, and qualifying different types of contributions. We argue that when users try to fit a system into their everyday lives, designers should consider supporting such efforts - even if user behavior does not match expectations. Designers who encourage emergent and unanticipated behaviors can enhance users' sense of participation and encourage the leap from intention to realized action.

Abstract In this article, the authors develop hypotheses about three key correlates of attitudes about discretionary online behaviors and control over one's own online information: frequency of engaging in risky online behaviors, experience of an online adverse event, and the disposition to be more or less trusting and cautious of others. Through an analysis of survey results, they find that online adverse events do not necessarily relate to greater overall Web discretion, but they do significantly associate with users' perceptions of Web information control. However, the frequencies with which individuals engage in risky online activities and behaviors significantly associate with both online discretion and information control. In addition, general dispositions to trust and be cautious are strongly related to prudent Internet behavior and attitudes about managing personal online information. The results of this study have clear consequences for our understanding of behaviors and attitudes that might lead to greater online social intelligence, or the ability to make prudent decisions in the presence of Internet uncertainties and risks. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.