AI is reshaping academic research, yet its role in peer review remains polarising and contentious. Advocates see its potential to reduce reviewer burden and improve quality, while critics warn of risks to fairness, accountability, and trust. At ICLR 2025, an official AI feedback tool was deployed to provide reviewers with post-review suggestions. We studied this deployment through surveys and interviews, investigating how reviewers engaged with the tool and perceived its usability and impact. Our findings surface both opportunities and tensions when AI augments in peer review. This work contributes the first empirical evidence of such an AI tool in a live review process, documenting how reviewers respond to AI-generated feedback in a high-stakes review context. We further offer design implications for AI-assisted reviewing that aim to enhance quality while safeguarding human expertise, agency, and responsibility.

Digital technologies play a role in the cognitive work of managing households, yet much of this labour remains invisible, making it harder to share, delegate, or value. Existing tools support household tasks but focus on visible activities such as chores or planning, leaving unclear how hidden domestic labour is supported. To address this, we surveyed 50 participants and conducted qualitative analysis. We found that value-driven labour, such as managing household vision and values, shapes other labours yet remains least visible and hardest to delegate. Domains like inclusion and special events appear salient in everyday life yet remain largely unsupported by current tools. We found that while family management is collaborative, most tools remain oriented to single users. We contribute an empirical mapping of digital support and gaps across six forms of family management labour, and offer a foundation for anticipating how emerging domestic technologies may support or inadvertently reshape this work.

Short-Form Video Content (SFVC) platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts have become important spaces for ADHD adults to share experiences. However, much existing research focuses on the challenges these platforms pose for ADHDers, including accentuating sleep problems and attention difficulties. This article presents an interview study with 32 ADHDers who articulated a more nuanced relationship with SFVC. It explores how engaging with ADHD communities on these platforms impacted ADHDers’ self-understanding, emotional well-being, and both online and offline relationships. ADHDers worked to maintain their agency in this attention economy, managing their experiences and intent through information seeking, self-regulation, handling misinformation, and curating algorithms. Findings are described under three themes: (1) Cultural Stigma and ADHD Perceptions Contextualize Engagement; (2) How ADHD SFVC Affects ADHDers’ Emotions and Contextual Behaviors; and (3) Broader Impacts on ADHD Relationships, Stigma, and Self-Perception. Challenging existing narratives, this work highlights the value of these communities for ADHDers.

Spreadsheet collaboration provides valuable opportunities for learning and expertise sharing between colleagues. Sharing expertise is essential for the retention of important technical skillsets within organisations, but previous studies suggest that spreadsheet experts often fail to disseminate their knowledge to others. We suggest that social norms and beliefs surrounding the value of spreadsheet use significantly influence user engagement in sharing behaviours. To explore this, we conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with professional spreadsheet users from two separate samples. We found that spreadsheet providers face challenges in adapting highly personalised strategies to often subjective standards and in evaluating the appropriate social timing of sharing. In addition, conflicted self-evaluations of one's spreadsheet expertise, dismissive normative beliefs about the value of this knowledge, and concerns about the potential disruptions associated with collaboration can further deter sharing. We suggest that these observations reflect the challenges of long-term learning in feature-rich software designed primarily with initial learnability in mind. We therefore provide implications for design to navigate this tension. Overall, our findings demonstrate how the complex interaction between technology design and social dynamics can shape collaborative learning behaviours in the context of feature-rich software.

Informal Knowledge Sharing (KS) is vital for enduser programmers to gain expertise. To better understand how personal (self-efficacy), social (reputational gains, trust between colleagues), and software-related (codification effort) variables influence spreadsheet KS intention, we conducted a multiple regressions analysis based on survey data from spreadsheet users ($n=100$) in administrative and finance roles. We found that high levels of spreadsheet self-efficacy and a perception that sharing would result in reputational gains predicted higher KS intention, but individuals who found knowledge codification effortful showed lower KS intention. We also observed that regardless of occupation, users tended to report a lower sense of self-efficacy in their general spreadsheet proficiency, despite also reporting high self-efficacy in spreadsheet use for job-related contexts. Our findings suggest that acknowledging and designing for these social and personal variables can help avoid situations where experienced individuals refrain unnecessarily from sharing, with implications for spreadsheet design.

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health problem, and cognitive-behavioral therapy is one of the most widely used, evidence-based treatments. While several mobile apps for anxiety that integrate cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques exist, ma- jor challenges remain concerning uptake and engagement. Personalization is one strategy that can be used to improve client engagement, and integrating therapist input is one mechanism for such personalization. This study aims to understand therapist practices and identify new possibilities for delivering intervention content between face-to-face CBT therapy sessions. It comprised semi-structured interviews, followed by a series of ideation activities, and thematic analysis of the data. The results showed the central role of clients in shaping the content of therapy sessions, their challenges with homework practice, and therapists’ diverse practices. Analysis of the ideation activities elaborated the potential role of therapists in the personalization of apps for anxiety. We conclude with takeaways for designers of personalized mental health mobile applications.

Attending university is an important time for many young people's social lives. But changes are afoot with new innovative digital higher-education experiences being built, shifting students' social lives further online. However, it is unclear how a longer-term shift to a digital university ecosystem will impact students and their social relations and how current technologies could amplify their social experience. We report a focus group study investigating the impact of a primarily digital university experience on the social relationships of incoming undergraduates. In line with existing research, we demonstrate how technology-mediated communications can benefit some aspects of students' social relations and less so for others. Our novel contribution is evidence of students' remarkable adaptiveness when facing an online-only university experience. Crucially, our participants identified and utilised the nuances of different online platforms to start and maintain new relationships. This way, they preserved their ability to nurture social relationships, even when dealing with an unexpected learning environment. We provide design recommendations for future metaversities and discuss students' resilience in sustaining personal relationships that can inform online-centric university models.

Social media (SM) breaks from studying can either support students' wellbeing and performance by acting as a recovery behaviour or subvert it by acting as a procrastination behaviour. It is currently unclear which influences lead an SM break to be a positive recovery vs. negative procrastination behaviour. A behavioural and emotion regulation (ER) perspective may help to elucidate these influences. In this paper, we report a semi-structured interview study with 20 undergraduates to explore their experiences of SM breaks when studying. Our analysis describes how motivational and environmental factors can influence a break's propensity for recovery or procrastination during the break initiation and execution phases. We apply an ER perspective to these reports and demonstrate how it helps to explain further in which circumstances SM breaks are likely to support recovery or procrastination. Based on this analysis, we present recommendations for designing interventions to support healthy breaks and reduce unhealthy ones.

Research suggests that the temporal flexibility advertised to crowdworkers by crowdsourcing platforms is limited by both client-imposed constraints (e.g., strict completion times) and crowdworkers’ tooling practices (e.g., multitasking). In this article, we explore an additional contributor to workers’ limited temporal flexibility: the design of crowdsourcing platforms, namely requiring crowdworkers to be ‘on call’ for work. We conducted two studies to investigate the impact of having to be ‘on call’ on workers’ schedule control and job control. We find that being ‘on call’ impacted (1) participants’ ability to schedule their time and stick to planned work hours, and (2) the pace at which participants worked and took breaks. The results of the two studies suggest that the ‘on-demand’ nature of crowdsourcing platforms can limit workers’ temporal flexibility by reducing schedule control and job control. We conclude the article by discussing the implications of the results for (a) crowdworkers, (b) crowdsourcing platforms, and (c) the wider platform economy.

Playing digital games can be an effective means of recovering from daily work strain. However, limited research has examined which player experiences contribute to this process, limiting the ability of players to select games and play them in a manner which helps them recover effectively. Hence, this paper reports a mixed-methods survey study investigating how a recent post-work recovery episode was impacted by immersion: a player experience which has been implicated in theoretical accounts relating games and recovery. We found that particular dimensions of immersion, such as cognitive involvement, support specific post-work recovery needs. Moreover, participants report not only experiencing benefits in a passive manner, but actively optimising their levels of immersion to achieve recovery. This study extends previous research by improving our understanding of how digital games support post-work recovery and by demonstrating that immersion is key in determining the restorative potential of digital games.

Abstract Over the past few decades, a small but growing group of people have worked remotely from their homes. With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of people found themselves joining this group overnight. In this position paper, we examine the kinds of work that ‘went remote’ in response to the pandemic, and consider the ways in which this transition was influenced by (and in turn came to influence) contemporary trends in digital workplace measurement and evaluation. We see that employers appeared reluctant to let certain classes of employee work remotely. When the pandemic forced staff home, employers compensated by turning to digital surveillance tools, even though, as we argue, these tools seem unable to overcome the significant conceptual barriers to understanding how people are working. We also observed that, in the United Kingdom context, the pandemic didn’t mean remote work for a significant proportion of the population. We assert that, to maximize its impact, ‘future of work’ research in human-centred computing must be more inclusive and representative of work, rather than focusing on the experiences of knowledge workers and those involved in new forms of work.

Despite the many technological advances over the past few decades designed to support remote working (also referred to as working from home, teleworking, etc.), prior to 2020 there had not been a l...

Message deletion in mobile messaging apps allows people to “unsay” things they have said. This paper explores how and why people use (or do not use) this feature within remediation strategies after a communication error is identified. We present findings from a multi-stage survey designed to explore people’s general experiences of the message deletion feature (N = 401), peoples’ experiences of using this feature during the remediation of an error (N = 70), and receivers’ perceptions around recent message deletions (N = 68). While people are typically aware of the deletion feature, it is infrequently used. When used, it is primarily done so to improve conversations by reducing confusion between conversation partners. We found people being aware of message deletions creating information-gaps which can provoke curiosity in recipients, causing them to develop narratives to help address the uncertainty. We found concerns amongst senders that these narratives would be of a negative nature, having an undesirable impact on how others perceive them. We use our findings to suggest ways in which mobile messaging apps could improve conversational experiences around erroneous and regrettable messages.

Although e-mail interfaces have not changed much in the past decade, how we manage our inbox has changed a lot, as a result of the growing number of messages we receive (The Radicati Group, 2015) a...

Designers commonly use gamification to improve the frequency of engagement with apps, but often fail to consider the impact of placement on reward value. As rewards tend to depreciate if delayed (termed temporal discounting), placing a reward further into the future can significantly affect its ability to motivate behaviour. We examine the most effective placement of gamified rewards so as to reduce discounting and to increase the frequency an application is used. In two online studies, users were asked to choose between fictional budget tracking applications that varied in the placement of either monetary (N=70) or gamified (N=70) rewards. In both experiments we found that people more frequently used the application that provided rewards before, rather than after, the task. As predicted by temporal discounting, our work suggests that placing rewards early in the interaction sequence leads to an improvement in the perceived value of that reward, motivating further selection. We discuss the findings in the context of designing effective reward structures to encourage more frequent app engagement.

Self-tracking is an important part of self-care. However, predefined self-tracking approaches can impede people's agency in managing their health. We investigated a customisable and pictorial self-tracking approach in multiple sclerosis self-management by implementing and conducting a field study of Trackly: a prototype app that supports people in defining and colouring pictorial trackers, such as body shapes. We found that participants utilised the elements of Trackly designed to support agentive behaviour: they defined personally meaningful tracking parameters in their own words, and particularly valued being able to flexibly colour in and make sense of their pictorial trackers. Having been able to support their individual self-care intentions with Trackly, participants reported a spectrum of interrelated experiences of agency, including a sense of ownership, identity, self-awareness, mindfulness, and control. Our findings demonstrate the importance of supporting people's individual needs and creative capacities to foster mindful and personally meaningful engagement with health and wellbeing data.

Reliable and accurate planning is essential for modern knowledge workers. However, there is limited insight about when, how and why planning is inaccurate, and the circumstances in which those inaccuracies are troublesome. To investigate this, we asked 20 academics to keep a diary for a single work day. They estimated the duration of the tasks they wanted to achieve at the start of the day and noted down in detail the tasks they actually achieved during the day. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to complement this diary data. The diaries showed that some tasks, such as email and coding, were more susceptible to time underestimation bias while other tasks, such as writing and planning, were more susceptible to time overestimation bias in planning. Based on interviews, a typology of common reasons for delays in planned daily work is presented. It suggests that vague and optimistic planning leads to the observed discrepancy between planned and actual work. Finally, interviews suggested that participants adopted four planning strategies that vary in the frequency of planning, from minimal planning to daily, weekly and multi-level planning. We close by discussing ways support systems for accurate planning can be better designed for different use cases.

Abstract Personal informatics technologies support the collection of and reflection on personal data, but enabling people to learn from and act on this data is still an on-going challenge. Sharing and discussing data is one way people can learn from it, but as yet, little research explores how peer discourses around data can shape understandings and promote action. We ran 3 workshops with 5-week follow-ups, giving 18 people the opportunity to swap their data and discuss it with another person. We found that these workshops helped them to recontextualise and to better understand their data, identify new strategies for changing their behaviour and motivated people to commit to changes in the future. These findings have implications for how personal informatics tools could help people identify opportunities for change and feel motivated to try out new strategies.

Many computer tasks involve looking up information from different sources, and these self-interruptions can be disruptive. In this article, we investigate whether giving people feedback on how long they are away from their task influences their self-interruption behaviour. We conducted a contextual inquiry on self-interruption behaviour in an office workplace. Participants were observed to postpone physical interruptions until a convenient moment in the task if they were expected to take time. In contrast, observations revealed that digital interruptions were addressed immediately; participants reported these were presumed to be quick to deal with. To increase awareness of time spent on digital interruptions, we developed TimeToFocus, a notification tool showing people the duration of their interruptions while working on a task. A field study deployment of TimeToFocus in an office workplace found that feedback on the duration of interruptions made participants reflect on what they were doing during interruptions. They reported that they used this insight to avoid task-irrelevant activities. To confirm whether participants’ perceptions of the benefit of the tool could be measured, we conducted an online experiment, where participants had to retrieve information from an email sent to their personal email addresses and enter it into a spreadsheet. Participants who used our tool made shorter interruptions, completed the spreadsheet task faster and made fewer data entry errors. We conclude that feedback on the length of interruptions can assist users in focusing on their primary task and thus improve productivity.

Crowdworkers receive no formal training for managing their tasks, time or working environment. To develop tools that support such workers, an understanding of their preferences and the constraints they are under is essential. We asked 317 experienced Amazon Mechanical Turk workers about factors that influence their task and time management. We found that a large number of the crowdworkers score highly on a measure of polychronicity; this means that they prefer to frequently switch tasks and happily accommodate regular work and non-work interruptions. While a preference for polychronicity might equip people well to deal with the structural demands of crowdworking platforms, we also know that multitasking negatively affects workers' productivity. This puts crowdworkers' working preferences into conflict with the desire of requesters to maximize workers' productivity. Combining the findings of prior research with the new knowledge obtained from our participants, we enumerate practical design options that could enable workers, requesters and platform developers to make adjustments that would improve crowdworkers' experiences.

This paper explores how a design fiction can be designed to be used as a pragmatic user-centred design method to generate insights on future technology use. We built HawkEye, a design fiction probe that embodies a future fiction of dementia care. To learn how participants respond to the probe, we employed it with eight participants for three weeks in their own homes as well as evaluating it with six HCI experts in sessions of 1.5h. In addition to presenting the probe in detail, we share insights into the process of building it and discuss the utility of design fiction as a tool to elicit empathetic and rich discussions about potential outcomes of future technologies.

Recent scandals involving data from participatory research have contributed to broader public concern about online privacy. Such concerns might make people more reluctant to participate in research that asks them to volunteer personal data, compromising many researchers' data collection. We tested several motivational messages that encouraged participation in a citizen science project. We measured people's willingness to disclose personal information. While participants were less likely to share sensitive data than neutral data, disclosure behaviour was not affected by attitudes to privacy. Importantly, we found that citizen scientists who were exposed to a motivational message that emphasised 'learning' were more likely to share sensitive information than those presented with other types of motivational cues. Our results suggest that priming individuals with motivational messages can increase their willingness to contribute personal data to a project, even if the request pertains to sensitive information.

Digital self-tracking technologies offer many potential benefits over self-tracking with paper notebooks. However, they are often too rigid to support people's practical and emotional needs in everyday settings. To inform the design of more flexible self-tracking tools, we examine bullet journaling: an analogue and customisable approach for logging and reflecting on everyday life. Analysing a corpus of paper bullet journal photos and related conversations on Instagram, we found that individuals extended and adapted bullet journaling systems to their changing practical and emotional needs through: (1) creating and combining personally meaningful visualisations of different types of trackers, such as habit, mood, and symptom trackers; (2) engaging in mindful reflective thinking through design practices and self-reflective strategies; and (3) posting photos of paper journals online to become part of a self-tracking culture of sharing and learning. We outline two interrelated design directions for flexible and mindful self-tracking: digitally extending analogue self-tracking and supporting digital self-tracking as a mindful design practice.

Consumer health technologies have an enormous potential to transform the self-management of chronic conditions. However, it is unclear how individuals use self-tracking technologies to manage them. This in-depth interview study explores self-tracking practices in multiple sclerosis (MS), a complex neurological disease that causes physical, cognitive, and psychological symptoms. Our findings illustrate that when faced the unpredictable and degenerative nature of MS, individuals regained a sense of control by intertwining self-care practices with different self-tracking technologies. They engaged in disease monitoring, fitness tracking, and life journaling to quantify the body and care for the mind. We focus attention on the role of emotional wellbeing and the experience of control in self-tracking and managing MS. Finally, we discuss in which ways self-tracking technologies could support the experiential nature of control and foster mindful experiences rather than focusing only on tracking primary disease indicators.

Users have access to a growing ecosystem of devices (desktop, mobile and wearable) that can deliver notifications and help people to stay in contact. Smartwatches are gaining popularity, yet little is known about the user experience and their impact on our increasingly always online culture. We report on a qualitative study with existing users on their everyday use of smartwatches to understand both the added value and the challenges of being constantly connected at the wrist. Our findings show that users see a large benefit in receiving notifications on their wrist, especially in terms of helping manage expectations of availability. Moreover, we find that response rates after viewing a notification on a smartwatch change based on the other devices available: laptops prompt quicker replies than smartphones. Finally, there are still many costs associated with using smartwatches, thus we make a series of design recommendations to improve the user experience of smartwatches.

Mobile devices are increasingly used while watching video, both as a secondary device and for dedicated viewing. However, devices frequently issue notifications that can interrupt viewing. This study investigated the effect of interruptions from notifications on viewer immersion. Participants watched 10 minutes of a movie without notifications, and 10 minutes while receiving message notifications. There were two participant groups: one watched video on a 30-inch monitor with messages sent to a separate smartphone; while another watched on a smartphone while also receiving messages on it. Viewer immersion was assessed after each condition via questionnaire. We also considered message response times. Results showed that immersion scores were lower when the video was interrupted with notifications, regardless of viewing device. Message response times were fastest when using the phone as a secondary device. Our results suggest that device-driven interruptions should be minimised for an immersive film experience.

Data-entry is a common activity that is usually performed accurately. When errors do occur though, people are poor at spotting them even if they are told to check their input. We considered whether making people pause for a brief moment before confirming their input would make them more likely to check it. We ran a lab experiment to test this idea. We found that task lockouts encouraged checking. Longer lockout durations made checking more likely. We ran a second experiment on a crowdsourcing platform to find out whether lockouts would still be effective in a less controlled setting. We discovered that longer lockouts induced workers to switch to other activities. This made the lockouts less effective. To be useful in practice, the duration of lockouts needs to be carefully calibrated. If lockouts are too brief they will not encourage checking. If they are too long they will induce switching.

The Internet of Things is connecting an ever-increasing number of devices. These devices often require access to personal information, but their meagre user interfaces usually do not permit traditional modes of authentication. On such devices, one-time pairing codes are often used instead. This pairing process can involve transcribing randomly generated alphanumeric codes, which can be frustrating, slow and error-prone. In this paper, we present an improved pairing method that uses sets of English words instead of random strings. The word method, although longer in terms of character length, allows users to pair devices more quickly, whilst still maintaining the complexity necessary for secure interactions.

Link-shortening services save space and make the manual entry of URLs less onerous. Short links are often included on printed materials so that people using mobile devices can quickly enter URLs. Although mobile transcription is a common use-case, link-shortening services generate output that is poorly suited to entry on mobile devices: links often contain numbers and capital letters that require time consuming mode switches on touch screen keyboards. With the aid of computational modeling, we identified problems with the output of a link-shortening service, bit.ly. Based on the results of this modeling, we hypothesized that longer links that are optimized for input on mobile keyboards would improve link entry speeds compared to shorter links that required keyboard mode switches. We conducted a human performance study that confirmed this hypothesis. Finally, we applied our method to a selection of different non-word mobile data-entry tasks. This work illustrates the need for service design to fit the constraints of the devices people use to consume services.

Obtaining high-quality data from crowds can be difficult if contributors do not give tasks sufficient attention. Attention checks are often used to mitigate this problem, but, because the roots of inattention are poorly understood, checks often compel attentive contributors to complete unnecessary work. We investigated a potential source of inattentiveness during crowdwork: multitasking. We found that workers switched to other tasks every 5 minutes, on average. There were indications that increasing switch frequency negatively affected performance. To address this, we tested an intervention that encouraged workers to stay focused on our task after multitasking was detected. We found that our intervention reduced the frequency of task switching. It also improves on existing attention checks because it does not place additional demands on workers who are already focused. Our approach shows that crowds can help to overcome some of the limitations of laboratory studies by affording access to naturalistic multitasking behavior.

Technology not only brings benefits such as flexible working practices but can also have negative stressful consequences such as increasing email overload and the blurring of work-home boundaries. We report on an exploratory study that extends the current understanding of email usage by investigating how different professions at a university manage work and personal emails using different devices and how this impacts their work-home boundary management. Our findings lead us to identify two user groups: those with permeable boundaries (primarily academics) and those who have more rigid ones (primarily professional services employees) and that there are differences in when, where and how they manage their work and personal emails. In particular we find that some participants use micro-boundary strategies to manage transitions between work and personal life. Based on these novel findings we propose improvements of email software design to facilitate effective email, work-home boundary management, and support micro-boundary practices.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to give us increased flexibility about when and where we choose to work and the freedom to deal with home tasks whilst at work. However more use of ICT for work during non-work time has been linked with negative outcomes including lower work and life satisfaction and increased stress. Previous work has suggested that in order to reduce some of these negative effects, people should adopt technology use strategies that aid separation of their home and work lives. In this paper we report the results of a questionnaire study investigating work-life balance boundary behaviours and technology use. We find that people use multiple devices as a way of creating boundaries between home and work, and the extent to which they do this relates to their boundary behaviour style. These findings have particular relevance given the increasing trend for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies.

Games are normally considered to be "fun", though recently there is growing interest in how gameplay can promote empathy and encourage reflection through "serious experience". However, when looking beyond enjoyment, it is not clear how to actually evaluate serious experience. We present an evaluation of four games that were submitted to a student game design competition; the competition challenged teams to design a game that inspired curiosity around human error and blame culture within the context of healthcare. The entries were judged by a panel of six experts and subjected to a round of play testing by twelve participants. Methods included gameplay observation, questionnaires, post-play interviews and follow-up email questions. We discuss the utility of these methods, with particular emphasis on how they enabled a consideration of the immediate and longer term impact of serious experience on players.

Habit formation is an important part of behavior change interventions: to ensure an intervention has long-term effects, the new behavior has to turn into a habit and become automatic. Smartphone apps could help with this process by supporting habit formation. To better understand how, we conducted a 4-week study exploring the influence of different types of cues and positive reinforcement on habit formation and reviewed the functionality of 115 habit formation apps. We discovered that relying on reminders supported repetition but hindered habit development, while the use of event-based cues led to increased automaticity; positive reinforcement was ineffective. The functionality review revealed that existing apps focus on self-tracking and reminders, and do not support event-based cues. We argue that apps, and technology-based interventions in general, have the potential to provide real habit support, and present design guidelines for interventions that could support habit formation through contextual cues and implementation intentions.

Game developers have to ensure their games are appealing to, and playable by, a range of people. However, although there has been interest in the game-play experience, we know little about how learning relates to player involvement. This is despite challenge being an integral part of game-play, providing players with potential opportunities to learn. This article reports on a multiple case-study approach that explored how learning and involvement come together in practice. Participants consisted of a mix of gamers and casual players. Data included interviews, multiple observations of game-play, postplay cued interviews, and diary entries. A set of theoretical claims representing suggested relationships between involvement and learning were developed on the basis of previous literature; these were then assessed through a critical examination of the data set. The resulting theory is presented as 14 refined claims that relate to micro and macro involvement; breakdowns and breakthroughs in action, understanding, and involvement; progress; and agency, meaning and compelling game-play. The claims emphasize how players experience learning via breakthroughs in understanding, where involvement is increased when the player feels responsible for progress. Supporting the relationship between learning and involvement is important for ensuring the success of commercial and educational games.

When searching a display, users sometimes know what the target is but sometimes do not. It has generally been assumed that for this latter case people must engage in a deeper semantic evaluation of items during the search process. This idea is central to Information Foraging theory. But do people actually spend longer assessing items when engaged in a semantically demanding search task' We investigate this by having participants locate target items in 16-item menus. Participants were either told exactly what to look for (known-item search) or they were told the category that the target belonged to (semantic search). Participants were faster and more accurate at known-item searches. Eye-movement data show that this was because participants were more likely to skip over items when performing known-item searches. Contrary to expectation, we found limited empirical evidence to support the idea that deeper semantic evaluations of items lead to longer gaze durations (this occurred only when items were arranged very close together). This finding is important because it reveals how people adopt different eye gaze strategies depending on the kind of search activity they are engaged in.

In most online citizen science projects, a large proportion of participants contribute in small quantities. To investigate how low contributors differ from committed volunteers, we distributed a survey to members of the Old Weather project, followed by interviews with respondents selected according to a range of contribution levels. The studies reveal a complex relationship between motivations and contribution. Whilst high contributors were deeply engaged by social or competitive features, low contributors described a solitary experience of 'dabbling' in projects for short periods. Since the majority of participants exhibit this small-scale contribution pattern, there is great potential value in designing interfaces to tempt lone workers to complete 'just another page', or to lure early drop-outs back into participation. This includes breaking the work into components which can be tackled without a major commitment of time and effort, and providing feedback on the quality and value of these contributions.

Despite the fact that a third of all cases of unintentional medication non-adherence are caused by simple forgetfulness, the majority of interventions neglect this issue. Even though patients have access to smartphone applications ("apps") designed to help them remember medication, neither their quality nor effectiveness has been evaluated yet. We report the findings of a functionality review of 229 medication reminder apps and a thematic analysis of their 1,012 user reviews. Our research highlights the gap between the theory and practice: while the literature shows that many medication regimens are habitual in nature and the presence of daily routines supports remembering, existing apps rely on timer-based reminders. To address this disparity, we present design requirements for building medication reminders that support the routine aspect of medication-taking and its individual nature, and demonstrate how they could be implemented to move from passive alerts to a smarter memory and routine assistant.

Recent advances in mobile technology have had many positive effects on the ways in which people can combine work and home life. For example, having remote access enables people to work from home, or work flexible hours that fit around caring responsibilities. They also support communication with colleagues and family members, and enable digital hobbies. However, the resulting 'always-online' culture can undermine work-home boundaries and cause stress to those who feel under pressure to respond immediately to digital notifications. This workshop will explore how a socio-technical perspective, which views boundaries as being constituted by everyday socio-technical practices, can inform the design of technologies that help maintain boundaries between work and home life.

Recovery is a necessary factor in avoiding work-related strain and in feeling prepared for the next day of work. In order for recovery to be successful, an individual must experience psychological detachment from work, relaxation, mastery experiences and a sense of control, all of which have been argued to be assisted by digital game use. However, it is unclear whether these associations will be greater for certain digital game genres, or whether this would extend to other recovery-related outcomes, for instance work home interference (WHI), where the stress from work interferes with home-life. These factors may be vital in determining whether interventions aimed at improving recovery using digital games would be effective, and what form these should take. The present research surveyed 491 participants and found that the total number of hours spent playing digital games per week was positively correlated with overall recovery. Correlations varied with genre, highlighting the importance of game characteristics in this relationship: first person shooters and action games were most highly correlated with recovery. Moreover, digital game use was not related to a reduction in work–home interference. When restricting the analysis to gamers who report to have developed online relationships, online social support mediated the relationship between digital game use and recovery. Results are discussed in terms of how digital games may be utilised to improve recovery and reduce work-related stress.

Number entry is a common task in many domains. In safety-critical environments such as air traffic control or on hospital wards, incorrect number entry can have serious harmful consequences. Research has investigated how interface designs can help prevent users from making number entry errors. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of two possible interface designs aimed at helping users detect number entry errors using the idea of a checksum: an additional (redundant) number that is related to the to-be-entered numbers in such a way that it is sufficient to verify the correctness of the checksum, as opposed to checking each of the entered numbers. The first interface requires users to check their own work with the help of the checksum; the second requires the user to enter the checksum along with the other numbers so that the system can do the checking. In each case, two numbers needed to be entered, while the third number served as a checksum. With the first interface, users caught only 36% of their errors. The second interface resulted in all errors being caught, but the need to enter the checksum increased entry time by 46%. When participants were allowed to choose between the two interfaces, they chose the second interface in only 12% of the cases. Although these results cannot be generalized to other specific contexts, the results illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of each way of using checksums to catch number entry errors. Hence our study can serve as a starting point for efforts to improve each method.

People are prone to making more errors when multitasking. Thus in safety-critical environments, it is often considered safer to perform tasks sequentially. Here we explore how the cost of accessing information affects the way people choose to interleave. An empirical study based on a medical scenario was conducted. Participants had to program infusion pump devices using information from a prescription form. The physical and mental effort involved in accessing information was manipulated. This was achieved by varying the physical distance between the prescription form and the devices. We demonstrate that by increasing information access cost, individuals are less likely to omit a required task step. This is because they adopt a more memory-intensive strategy, which encourages interleaving at natural boundaries, i.e., after completing the programming of one of the pumps. Interleaving during programming can result in task steps being forgotten.

Previous research into the experience of videogames has shown the importance of the role of challenge in producing a good experience. However, defining exactly which challenges are important and which aspects of gaming experience are affected is largely under-explored. In this paper, we investigate if altering the level of challenge in a videogame influences people's experience of immersion. Our first study demonstrates that simply increasing the physical demands of the game by requiring gamers to interact more with the game does not result in increased immersion. In a further two studies, we use time pressure to make games more physically and cognitively challenging. We find that the addition of time pressure increases immersion as predicted. We argue that the level of challenge experienced is an interaction between the level of expertise of the gamer and the cognitive challenge encompassed within the game.

Abstract Information behavior (IB) research involves examining how people look for and use information, often with the sole purpose of gaining insights into the behavior displayed. However, it is also possible to examine IB with the purpose of using the insights gained to design new tools or improve the design of existing tools to support information seeking and use. This approach is advocated by David Ellis who, over two decades ago, presented a model of information seeking behaviors and made suggestions for how electronic tools might be designed to support these behaviors. Ellis also recognized that IBs might be used as the basis for evaluating as well as designing electronic resources. In this article, we present the IB evaluation methods. These two novel methods, based on an extension of Ellis's model, use the empirically observed IBs of lawyers as a framework for structuring user‐centered evaluations of the functionality and usability of electronic resources. In this article, we present the IB methods and illustrate their use through the discussion of two examples. We also discuss benefits and limitations, grounded in specific features of the methods.