Children today encounter social issues—climate change, conflict, inequality—through digital technologies, and the design of that encounter shapes whether young people move toward lasting civic engagement or toward anxiety and withdrawal. Much of the content children see is optimized for attention through fear and urgency, with few pathways toward meaningful action—contributing to rising distress and disengagement among young people who care deeply but feel powerless to act. This half-day workshop introduces “sustainable care” as a design lens, asking how technology might support children’s sustained engagement with social causes without contributing to empathic distress or burnout. We invite researchers and practitioners across child-computer interaction, games, education, and youth mental health to map this landscape together and develop a research agenda for the CCI community.

We present a design framework for friendship-supportive youth social media, derived from a synthesis of five empirical studies with 331 youth participants (ages 13–25) using interviews, co-design, surveys, diary studies, and a field deployment. Iterative analysis of 209 design-relevant data points identified three pillars: Social Understanding (interaction norms, interaction cues and scaffolding, social accountability and governance), Placeness (third place and community, boundaries and personal spaces, shared presence), and Identity Alignment (identity currency, identity plurality, relational identity signals). The framework maps nine design spaces through which platforms can support the conditions under which youth friendships form, deepen, and are maintained. It offers a shared vocabulary for locating contributions, comparing design interventions, and identifying under-explored areas for future work.

In the attention economy, online platforms are incentivized to design products that maximize user engagement, even when such practices conflict with users’ best interests. We conducted a structured content analysis of all Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) to identify the designs these influential apps and sites use to capture attention and extend engagement. Specifically, we conducted this analysis posing as a teenager to identify the designs that young people are exposed to. We find that VLOPs use four strategies to extend teens’ use: pressuring, enticing, trapping, and lulling them into spending more time online. We report on a hierarchical taxonomy organizing the 63 designs that fall under these categories. Applying this taxonomy to all 17 VLOPs, we identify 583 instances of engagement-prolonging designs, with social media platforms using twice as many as other VLOPs. We present three vignettes illustrating how these designs reinforce one another in practice. We further contribute a graphical dataset of videos illustrating these features in the wild.

Experiments in human-computer interaction (HCI) often evaluate whether a prototype is “better,” but novelty alone can affect users’ judgments and possibly performance. To quantify this effect, we conducted a within-subjects study of 48 participants comparing four pairs of functionally identical prototypes (mice, keyboards, search engines, and AI chatbots). Each pair differed only in cosmetic features and a label marking one as “old” and the other as “new.” Novelty labeling shifted preference: up to 77% favored the version labeled “new.” Subjective ratings for the search engine increased under the “new’’ label by up to 7.1%. For the AI chatbot, ratings were driven by preference, with the preferred version rated up to 11.6% higher than the unpreferred one. Performance differences were modest and emerged for errors (e.g., 9.7% fewer misses with the “new” mouse, up to 7.2% lower error rates with the “new” keyboard). Technology readiness predicted baseline skill and occasionally moderated performance but did not protect judgments from novelty bias. These results show that novelty labeling reframes interpretation and preference more than performance, raising concerns for HCI evaluations relying on participant judgments.

The accessibility of interactive technologies is often evaluated using checklists that are low-level, numerous, and platform-specific. Such checklists are typically used by accessibility experts, leaving everyday designers and developers with little support for assessing their own interfaces. To make accessibility evaluations easier to conduct, we devised a set of nine “ability heuristics” that prompt designers to engage with accessibility throughout the design process. We empirically evaluated these ability heuristics with 37 design students, comparing them to usability heuristics and WCAG. The ability heuristics emphasized the quality of accessibility features compared to the other methods, and surfaced issues that were more broadly dispersed across disability groups. Further, the students found the heuristics were as easy to use as the alternative methods. We argue that the heuristics help to move beyond binary notions of accessibility, pushing designers to consider the quality of features across diverse disabilities and the range of abilities within.

As LLM-based computer-use agents (CUAs) begin to autonomously interact with real-world interfaces, understanding their vulnerability to manipulative interface designs becomes increasingly critical. We introduce SusBench, an online benchmark for evaluating the susceptibility of CUAs to UI dark patterns, designs that aim to manipulate or deceive users into taking unintentional actions. Drawing nine common dark pattern types from existing taxonomies, we developed a method for constructing believable dark patterns on real-world consumer websites through code injections, and designed 313 evaluation tasks across 55 websites. Our study with 29 participants showed that humans perceived our dark pattern injections to be highly realistic, with the vast majority of participants not noticing that these had been injected by the research team. We evaluated five state-of-the-art CUAs on the benchmark. We found that both human participants and agents are particularly susceptible to the dark patterns of Preselection, Trick Wording, and Hidden Information, while being resilient to other overt dark patterns. Our findings inform the development of more trustworthy CUAs, their use as potential human proxies in evaluating deceptive designs, and the regulation of an online environment increasingly navigated by autonomous agents.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2024

Peer Reviewed

Smartphone users often regret aspects of their phone use, especially social media use.However, pinpointing specific ways in which the design of an interface contributes to regrettable use can be challenging due to the complexity of social media app features and user intentions.We conducted a one-week study with 17 Android users, using a novel method where we passively collected screenshots every five seconds, which we analyzed via a multimodal large language model to understand participants' usage activity at a finegrained level.Triangulating this data with data from experience sampling, surveys, and interviews, we found that regret varies based on user intention, with non-intentional and social media use being especially regrettable.Regret also varies by social media activity; participants were most likely to regret viewing algorithmically recommended content and comments.Additionally, participants frequently deviated to browsing social media when their intention was direct communication, which slightly increased their regret.Our findings provide guidance to designers and policy-makers seeking to improve users' experience and autonomy.

Co-design is not merely a set of design activities, but is grounded in the belief of equitable access and input in design. However, a common assumption in co-design is that participants can use their hands, easily communicate, and are able to actively participate in a timeframe based on the researcher’s agenda. These assumptions can exclude underserved populations, including participants with motor and communication disabilities. We present Aligned Co-Design (ACD), a multi-modal, temporally flexible method grounded in communication theory and interdependent relationships. ACD requires the researcher to address their assumptions, communication, and role in co-design. We provide a proof-of-concept of ACD in practice, demonstrating multi-modal communication techniques and how those techniques align understanding and an equitable partnership in co-design. ACD achieves co-design’s theoretical commitment to establish an interdependent partnership with a currently under-represented population in co-design, adults who have motor or communication disabilities, thereby increasing equity and inclusion in co-design.

Relationships are essential to our happiness and wellbeing, yet their dissolution-the final stage of a relationship's lifecycle-is among the most stressful events individuals can experience, often leading to profound and lasting impacts. With the breakup process increasingly facilitated by technology, such as computer-mediated communication, and the likely future influence of generative AI tools, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 21 participants. We aim to understand: 1) the current role of technology in the breakup process, 2) the needs and support individuals seek during this time, and 3) how GenAI might address or undermine these needs. Our findings show that people have distinct needs at various stages of breakups. While currently technology plays an important role, it falls short in supporting users' unmet needs. Participants envision that GenAI could: 1) aid in prompting self-reflection, providing neutral second opinions, and assisting with planning leading up to a breakup; 2) serve as a communication mediator, supporting wording and tone to facilitate emotional expression during breakup conversations; and 3) support personal growth and offer companionship after a breakup. However, our findings also reveal participants' various concerns about involving GenAI in this process. Based on our results, we discuss the potential opportunities, harms, and design implications of GenAI tools in facilitating people's relationship dissolution.

Through co-design interviews (N=19) and a design evaluation survey (N=136) with U.S. teens ages 13-18, we investigated teens' privacy management on social media. Our study revealed that 28.1% of teens with public accounts and 15.3% with private accounts experience dysfunctional fear, that is, fear that diminishes their quality of life or paralyzes them from taking necessary precautions. These fears fall into three categories: fear of uncontrolled audience reach, fear of online hostility, and fear of personal privacy missteps. While current approaches often emphasize individual vigilance and restrictive measures, our findings show this can paradoxically lead teens to either withdraw from beneficial social interactions or resign themselves to accept privacy violations, viewing them as inevitable. Drawing on teen input, we developed and evaluated ten design prototypes that emphasize empowerment over fear, system-wide explicit emphasis on privacy, clear privacy norms, and flexible controls. Survey results indicate teens perceive these approaches as effectively reducing privacy concerns while preserving social benefits. Our findings suggest that platforms will be more likely to protect teens' privacy and less likely to manufacture unnecessary fear if they include designs that minimize the impact on other users, have low trade-offs with existing features, require minimal user effort, and function independently of community behavior. Such designs include: 1) alerting users about potentially unintentional personal information disclosure and 2) following up on user reports.

Platforms like Nextdoor and Citizen can increase users’ fear of crime by broadcasting frequent, local, and personalized information about potential safety risks. These platforms can contribute to a dysfunctional fear of crime, which undermines a person’s quality of life and mental health without actually making them feel safer. In this work, we conducted a mixed-methods study to understand the potential for design to foster a functional fear of crime, which motivates precaution without negatively impacting quality of life. We first interview individuals with a dysfunctional fear of crime and then validate interview results with a survey. Through this process, we identified five strategies for designers to support users in developing a more functional fear of crime. These strategies surface overarching theoretical and design implications for designers and researchers of safety platform with the ultimate goal of supporting safety, quality of life, and mental health for users of these platforms.

Children’s video games are controversial for their deeply engrossing nature. We conducted an interview and observational study with 17 eight-to-thirteen-year-olds to examine how they deploy their attention while gaming. In sessions of 60-75 minutes, a research assistant toured either Roblox or Minecraft, following the lead of a child participant. We analyzed a segment of these interviews to understand participants’ patterns of normative dissociation—experiences of complete cognitive absorption that exclude processing of the environment beyond the focus of attention. Our analysis revealed that many of our participants had experiences that fit the model of normative dissociation. Participants reported becoming deeply absorbed in games to the point of losing track of time and not paying attention to their surroundings. Game design influenced children’s patterns of normative dissociation, and in particular, user-paced traveling through the game environment and game-initiated pauses allowed children to more easily attend to stimuli outside the game. We recommend parental controls leverage these points of game play to collaboratively support children’s time management during gameplay.

Prior research links teens’ social media use to a reduction in their sense of well-being. The current study investigates how design mediates this link, with an overarching goal of designing better social media experiences for teens. We conducted a mixed-method study with teens (N=25, Mage= 16.5 years) to investigate their moment-by-moment experiences and emotional states while using Instagram. Our analysis showed that teens’ experiences on Instagram often entailed sifting through a content soup dominated by uninteresting, irrelevant content. Boredom served as a reason to enter Instagram, a justification to leave, and as a dominant feeling during a session. The promise of social connection was the main motivator for teens to use Instagram. Teens developed strategies to maintain a state of emotional equilibrium as they sought moments of connection with friends: (1) Feed gatekeeping, (2) Backpedaling away from negative content, (3) Choosing to hide like-counts, and (4) Avoiding notification whiplash.

Popular and news media often portray teenagers with sensationalism, as both a risk to society and at risk from society. As AI begins to absorb some of the epistemic functions of traditional media, we study how teenagers in two countries speaking two languages: 1) are depicted by AI, and 2) how they would prefer to be depicted. Specifically, we study the biases about teenagers learned by static word embeddings (SWEs) and generative language models (GLMs), comparing these with the perspectives of adolescents living in the U.S. and Nepal. We find English-language SWEs associate teenagers with societal problems, and more than 50% of the 1,000 words most associated with teenagers in the pretrained GloVe SWE reflect such problems. Given prompts about teenagers, 30% of outputs from GPT2-XL and 29% from LLaMA-2-7B GLMs discuss societal problems, most commonly violence, but also drug use, mental illness, and sexual taboo. Nepali models, while not free of such associations, are less dominated by social problems. Data from workshops with N=13 U.S. adolescents and N=18 Nepalese adolescents show that AI presentations are disconnected from teenage life, which revolves around activities like school and friendship. Participant ratings of how well 20 trait words describe teens are decorrelated from SWE associations, with Pearson's rho=.02, n.s. in English FastText and rho=.06, n.s. GloVe; and rho=.06, n.s. in Nepali FastText and rho=-.23, n.s. in GloVe. U.S. participants suggested AI could fairly present teens by highlighting diversity, while Nepalese participants centered positivity. Participants were optimistic that, if it learned from adolescents, rather than media sources, AI could help mitigate stereotypes. Our work offers an understanding of the ways SWEs and GLMs misrepresent a developmentally vulnerable group and provides a template for less sensationalized characterization.

Multimodal AI models capable of associating images and text hold promise for numerous domains, ranging from automated image captioning to accessibility applications for blind and low-vision users. However, uncertainty about bias has in some cases limited their adoption and availability. In the present work, we study 43 CLIP vision-language models to determine whether they learn human-like facial impression biases, and we find evidence that such biases are reflected across three distinct CLIP model families. We show for the first time that the the degree to which a bias is shared across a society predicts the degree to which it is reflected in a CLIP model. Human-like impressions of visually unobservable attributes, like trustworthiness and sexuality, emerge only in models trained on the largest dataset, indicating that a better fit to uncurated cultural data results in the reproduction of increasingly subtle social biases. Moreover, we use a hierarchical clustering approach to show that dataset size predicts the extent to which the underlying structure of facial impression bias resembles that of facial impression bias in humans. Finally, we show that Stable Diffusion models employing CLIP as a text encoder learn facial impression biases, and that these biases intersect with racial biases in Stable Diffusion XL-Turbo. While pretrained CLIP models may prove useful for scientific studies of bias, they will also require significant dataset curation when intended for use as general-purpose models in a zero-shot setting.

This research introduces the Multilevel Embedding Association Test (ML-EAT), a method designed for interpretable and transparent measurement of intrinsic bias in language technologies. The ML-EAT addresses issues of ambiguity and difficulty in interpreting the traditional EAT measurement by quantifying bias at three levels of increasing granularity: the differential association between two target concepts with two attribute concepts; the individual effect size of each target concept with two attribute concepts; and the association between each individual target concept and each individual attribute concept. Using the ML-EAT, this research defines a taxonomy of EAT patterns describing the nine possible outcomes of an embedding association test, each of which is associated with a unique EAT-Map, a novel four-quadrant visualization for interpreting the ML-EAT. Empirical analysis of static and diachronic word embeddings, GPT-2 language models, and a CLIP language-and-image model shows that EAT patterns add otherwise unobservable information about the component biases that make up an EAT; reveal the effects of prompting in zero-shot models; and can also identify situations when cosine similarity is an ineffective metric, rendering an EAT unreliable. Our work contributes a method for rendering bias more observable and interpretable, improving the transparency of computational investigations into human minds and societies.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-mediated communication (AIMC), tools powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming integral to interpersonal communication. Employing a mixed-methods approach, we conducted a one-week diary and interview study to explore users’ perceptions of these tools’ ability to: 1) support interpersonal communication in the short-term, and 2) lead to potential long-term effects. Our findings indicate that participants view AIMC support favorably, citing benefits such as increased communication confidence, finding precise language to express their thoughts, and navigating linguistic and cultural barriers. However, our findings also show current limitations of AIMC tools, including verbosity, unnatural responses, and excessive emotional intensity. These shortcomings are further exacerbated by user concerns about inauthenticity and potential overreliance on the technology. We identify four key communication spaces delineated by communication stakes (high or low) and relationship dynamics (formal or informal) that differentially predict users’ attitudes toward AIMC tools. Specifically, participants report that these tools are more suitable for communicating in formal relationships than informal ones and more beneficial in high-stakes than low-stakes communication.

Relationships are perhaps the single greatest source of human happiness, and as part of building strong relationships, conflict and hard conversations are unavoidable. As people increasingly rely on digital communication to initiate and resolve conflicts, we examine how design can improve the experience of working through hard conversations within close relationships. We interviewed six psychotherapists and twenty-one social media users to understand both theoretical best practices for navigating conflict and users' experiences with hard conversations online, particularly on text-based messaging platforms. We used our findings to create a temporal model of how digital design could intervene to support users and their relationships during these conversations. Specifically, we find that design can help to facilitate more mutually consensual difficult conversations, support emotional regulation during the conversation, and help facilitate pauses when necessary. We explore the tensions between balancing the needs of relationships and the individuals in them in digital design, and how to center relationships in digital design.

Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the pressures created by social media, such as heightened self-consciousness and the need for extensive self-presentation. In this study, we investigate how BeReal, a social media platform designed to counter some of these pressures, influences adolescents' self-presentation behaviors. We interviewed 29 users aged 13-18 to understand their experiences with BeReal. We found that BeReal's design focuses on spontaneous sharing, including randomly timed daily notifications and reciprocal posting, discourages staged posts, encourages careful curation of the audience, and reduces pressure on self-presentation. The space created by BeReal offers benefits such as validating an unfiltered life and reframing social comparison, but its approach to self-presentation is sometimes perceived as limited or unappealing and, at times, even toxic. Drawing on this empirical data, we propose design guidelines for platforms that support authentic self-presentation while fostering reciprocity and expanding beyond spontaneous photo-sharing. These guidelines aim to enable users to portray themselves more comprehensively and accurately, ultimately supporting teens' developmental needs, particularly in building authentic relationships.

Socioemotional competencies are fundamental for children’s growth and success, and prior work shows that in some instances, technology can support children in acquiring these skills. Here, we examine whether children can learn to use a socioemotional strategy known as “self-talk” from a conversational agent (CA). To investigate this question, we designed and built “Self-Talk with Superhero Zip,” an interactive CA experience, and deployed it for one week in ten family homes to pairs of siblings between the ages of five and ten (N = 20). We found that children could recall and accurately describe the lessons taught by the intervention, and we saw indications of children applying self-talk in daily life. Targeting sibling pairs rather than individual users proved to be a design challenge in its own right, and families suggested design ideas for supporting this context, such as UI to manage conversational flow and reduce competition, and visuals and embodied activities to encourage focus. The dual-user context coupled with the audio modality prompted “preinput huddles” in which children conversed in whispers before responding to the system. We contribute evidence that CAs can support children in learning to use self-talk as well as design guidance for creating multi-user conversational interfaces.

To gain deeper insight into how the creators of children’s technology operationalize child well-being, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 industry professionals who create child-centered interactive technologies, including platforms, content, and policies. Interviewees’ descriptions of well-being clustered into four hierarchical categories, focusing on creating experiences that were: 1) safe, 2) usable, 3) educational, and 4) meaningful. We found that organizational culture influenced designers’ self-reported ability to create child-centered products, and companies with a culture that explicitly prioritized child well-being and drew on input from experts were able to scaffold even novice employees in attending to child users’ developmental needs. Finally, we found that companies struggled to define product metrics that reflected the full continuum of child well-being and often fell back on simplistic measures like engagement and download counts. We contribute a framework outlining current industry conceptualizations of designing for child well-being, with the depth of well-being support mapped to one axis and respect for children’s agency mapped to the other.

Deceptive design patterns (known as dark patterns) are interface characteristics which modify users’ choice architecture to gain users’ attention, data, and money. Deceptive design patterns have yet to be documented in safety technologies despite evidence that designers of safety technologies make decisions that can powerfully influence user behavior. To address this gap, we conduct a case study of the Citizen app, a commercially available technology which notifies users about local safety incidents. We bound our study to Atlanta and triangulate interview data with an analysis of the user interface. Our results indicate that Citizen heightens users’ anxiety about safety while encouraging the use of profit-generating features which offer security. These findings contribute to an emerging conversation about how deceptive design patterns interact with sociocultural factors to produce deceptive infrastructure. We propose the need to expand an existing taxonomy of harm to include emotional load and social injustice and offer recommendations for designers interested in dismantling the deceptive infrastructure of safety technologies.

YouTube has many features, such as homepage recommendations, that encourage users to explore its vast library of videos. However, when users visit YouTube with a specific intention, e.g., learning how to program in Python, these features to encourage exploration are often distracting. Prior work has innovated ‘commitment interfaces’ that restrict social media but finds that they often indiscriminately block needed content. In this paper, we describe the design, development, and evaluation of an ‘adaptable commitment interface,’ the SwitchTube mobile app, in which users can toggle between two interfaces when watching YouTube videos: Focus Mode (search-first) and Explore Mode (recommendations-first). In a three-week field deployment with 46 US participants, we evaluate how the ability to switch between interfaces affects user experience, finding that it provides users with a greater sense of agency, satisfaction, and goal alignment. We conclude with design implications for how adaptable commitment interfaces can support digital wellbeing.

Many people have experienced mindlessly scrolling on social media. We investigated these experiences through the lens of normative dissociation: total cognitive absorption, characterized by diminished self-awareness and reduced sense of agency. To explore user experiences of normative dissociation and how design affects the likelihood of normative dissociation, we deployed Chirp, a custom Twitter client, to 43 U.S. participants. Experience sampling and interviews revealed that sometimes, becoming absorbed in normative dissociation on social media felt like a beneficial break. However, people also reported passively slipping into normative dissociation, such that they failed to absorb any content and were left feeling like they had wasted their time. We found that designed interventions–including custom lists, reading history labels, time limit dialogs, and usage statistics–reduced normative dissociation. Our findings demonstrate that interaction designs intended to capture attention likely do so by harnessing people’s natural inclination to seek normative dissociation experiences. This suggests that normative dissociation may be a more productive framing than addiction for discussing social media overuse.

Existing designs helping people manage their social media use include: 1) external supports that monitor and limit use; 2) internal supports that change the interface itself. Here, we design and deploy Chirp, a mobile Twitter client, to independently examine how users experience external and internal supports. To develop Chirp, we identified 16 features that influence users’ sense of agency on Twitter through a survey of 129 participants and a design workshop. We then conducted a four-week within-subjects deployment with 31 participants. Our internal supports (including features to filter tweets and inform users when they have exhausted new content) significantly increased users’ sense of agency, while our external supports (a usage dashboard and nudges to close the app) did not. Participants valued our internal supports and said that our external supports were for “other people.” Our findings suggest that design patterns promoting agency may serve users better than screen time tools.

Online political arguments have a reputation for being futile exchanges, partially because people often respond more punitively to those who do not share their views, a phenomenon called ingroup bias. We explore how ingroup bias affects political disagreements online, and how respect can mitigate its effects. Towards this goal, we conducted an experiment on Twitter systematically varying respectful versus neutral disagreement language across people who did and did not share views. We found that people who do not share views were most likely to reply to disagreements, and neutral disagreements generated more discussions than respectful disagreements. However, we also found that using respectful language increased respectful language received in return, and it reduced the effects of ingroup bias across conversations with people who do and do not share the same views. We conclude with recommendations to promote respectful language on social media and build shame resiliency online, such as designs that encourages thoughtful engagement and a peer support network that allows users to share shame experiences online.

Millions of children now use conversational agents (CAs), leading researchers and the public alike to ask how interactions with these devices might shape children’s communication with people. We conducted a single-session observational lab study with 22 five-to-ten-year-old children as a step toward understanding whether and how children might transfer a linguistic routine they learned from a CA to a conversation with another person. We found that 68% of children spontaneously used this routine in a conversation with their parent in the lab, and 55% continued to use it at home. When addressing parents, children infused the routine with warmth and playfulness that they did not use when addressing the CA, adapting it to suit their relationship with their parent. However, only 18% of children used it in conversation with an unfamiliar researcher, where they instead were more likely to follow conventional conversational norms. These findings suggest children are quick to learn linguistic routines from CAs but use social differentiation when they apply them. Children’s willingness to expand on and share the routine with their parent is consistent with the principles of the Joint Media Engagement (JME) framework and suggests CAs may be a productive medium for creating JME experiences.

Would you rather go 1000 days without the Internet or five days where anyone can read your mind? We present “Would You Rather” (WYR), a technique for generating formative design insights (inspired by the conversational game of the same name) that combines design provocations with forced-choice scaffolding. Here, we describe the components of a WYR session, which include scenario generation, voting, and group discussion. As children disproportionately benefit from scaffolding during the co-design process, we also report on an evaluation of the technique with 16 children, conducted across seven sessions and spanning the course of one year. We find that WYR fulfills recommendations for focus groups (e.g. eliciting mental models and values, producing focused yet animated discussion) and leverages playfulness, humor, structure, and forced choice to overcome known common challenges of designing with children.

We investigated the experiences of 15 parents and their tween children (ages 8-12, n=23) during nature explorations using the NatureCollections app, a mobile application that connects children with nature. Drawing on parent interviews and in-app audio recordings from a 2-week deployment study, we found that tweens experiences with the NatureCollections app were influenced by tensions surrounding how parents and tweens negotiate technology use more broadly. Despite these tensions, the app succeeded in engaging tweens in outdoor nature explorations, and parents valued the shared family experiences around nature. Parents desired the app to support family bonding and inform them about how their tween used the app. This work shows how applications intended to support enriching youth experiences are experienced in the context of screen time tensions between parents and tween during a transitional period of child development. We offer recommendations for designing digital experiences to support family needs and reduce screen time tensions.

In the attention economy, video apps employ design mechanisms like autoplay that exploit psychological vulnerabilities to maximize watch time. Consequently, many people feel a lack of agency over their app use, which is linked to negative life effects such as loss of sleep. Prior design research has innovated external mechanisms that police multiple apps, such as lockout timers. In this work, we shift the focus to how the internal mechanisms of an app can support user agency, taking the popular YouTube mobile app as a test case. From a survey of 120 U.S. users, we find that autoplay and recommendations primarily undermine sense of agency, while playlists and search support it. From 13 co-design sessions, we find that when users have a specific intention for how they want to use YouTube they prefer interfaces that support greater agency. We discuss implications for how designers can help users reclaim a sense of agency over their media use.

Two-dimensional canvases are the core components of many digital productivity and creativity tools, with “artboards” containing objects rather than pixels. Unfortunately, the contents of artboards remain largely inaccessible to blind users relying on screen-readers, but the precise problems are not well understood. This study sought to understand how blind screen-reader users interact with artboards. Specifically, we conducted contextual interviews, observations, and task-based usability studies with 15 blind participants to understand their experiences of artboards found in Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, and Google Slides. Participants expressed that the inaccessibility of these artboards contributes to significant educational and professional barriers. We found that the key problems faced were: (1) high cognitive loads from a lack of feedback about artboard contents and object state; (2) difficulty determining relationships among artboard objects; and (3) constant uncertainty about whether object manipulations were successful. We offer design remedies that improve feedback for object state, relationships, and manipulations.

Good faith disagreements and healthy conflict management are essential to deliberative democracy and building strong relationships. People increasingly use computer-mediated communication during disagreements, which raises the question of how technology and design impact users' disagreements and relationships. We conducted a mixed-methods study with 257 participants to understand how design impacts disagreements across both existing social media platforms and novel, user-generated designs. Through interviews, a survey, and storyboard evaluations, we found that users often want to discuss challenging topics online but avoid them due to fear of hurting their relationships. Further, we found that users are most excited about design interventions that empower collective group action, humanize others online, or support channel switching to more private or socially rich contexts. Our results suggest that although technology has the potential to support users during conflict, it is also rife with possibilities to do more harm than good by diluting users' intentions, intruding, or backfiring. We introduce "interpersonal design,'' which centers relationships in the design process, an essential step in supporting users in the challenging task of arguing well.

The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of families with young children as school closures and social distancing requirements left caregivers struggling to facilitate educational experiences, maintain social connections, and ensure financial stability. Considering families' increased reliance on technology to survive, this research documents parents' lived experiences adapting to technology's outsized role alongside other shifts in family life associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe a 10-week study with 30 enrolled families with children aged 3 to 13 in the United States using the asynchronous remote communities (ARC) methodology to 1) understand the benefits and challenges faced by families as they adapted technology at home to navigate the pandemic, and 2) to ideate improvements to those experiences through co-design. We found that amidst gaps in infrastructural support from schools, workplaces, and communities, parents experienced deep anxiety and took on new roles, including tech support, school administrator, and curator of meaningful activities for their children. As parents shared bold and creative technology-based solutions for improving family well-being, schooling experiences, social life, and beyond, they demonstrated their capacity to contribute to new models of learning and family life. Our findings are a call to action for CSCW researchers, designers, and family-focused practitioners to work with learning communities that incorporate parent, teacher, and technology experiences in their academic and community planning.

Hundreds of popular mobile apps today market their ties to mindfulness. What activities do these apps support and what benefits do they claim? How do mindfulness teachers, as domain experts, view these apps? We first conduct an exploratory review of 370 mindfulness-related apps on Google Play, finding that mindfulness is presented primarily as a tool for relaxation and stress reduction. We then interviewed 15 U.S. mindfulness teachers from the therapeutic, Buddhist, and Yogic traditions about their perspectives on these apps. Teachers expressed concern that apps that introduce mindfulness only as a tool for relaxation neglect its full potential. We draw upon the experiences of these teachers to suggest design implications for linking mindfulness with further contemplative practices like the cultivation of compassion. Our results also speak to the importance of coherence in design: that the metaphors and mechanisms of a technology align with the underlying principles it follows.

Can a mobile application encourage children to spend more time outdoors and promote their connectedness to nature? In this paper, we present results from a three-week experimental deployment study of NatureCollections, a mobile application that allows users to build, curate, and share nature photo collections. Twenty-eight children (aged 9-12) and their parents participated in the study; 15 used the NatureCollections app, and 13 used a basic Photo app. We found that the NatureCollections app significantly increased the time children spent outdoors compared to the Photo app. Children in both groups said they felt happy and excited about spending time in nature. However, children in the NatureCollections group reported that time spent outside with the app increased their curiosity about the types of species and plants they saw and photographed. Children in the NatureCollections group also engaged in nature-based conversations with their parents, and even sought to look up information online about the plants and animals they observed. In contrast, children in the basic Photo app group did not display this level of curiosity about what they saw in nature, and the photos they took were driven largely by the aesthetic qualities of nature elements. Our results suggest that NatureCollections promotes and supports children's connectedness to nature.

Smart speakers have become pervasive in family homes, creating the potential for these devices to influence parent-child dynamics and parenting behaviors. We investigate the impact of introducing a smart speaker to 10 families with children, over four weeks. We use pre- and post- deployment interviews with the whole family and in-home audio capture of parent-child interactions with the smart speaker for our analysis. Despite the smart speaker causing occasional conflict in the home, we observed that parents lever-aged the smart speaker to further parenting goals. We found three forms of influence the smart speaker has on family dynamics: 1) fostering communication, 2) disrupting access, and 3) augmenting parenting. All of these influences arise from a communally accessible, stand-alone voice interface which democratizes family access to technology. We discuss design implications in furthering parenting practices and behaviors as the capabilities of the technology continue to improve.

Online status indicators (OSIs) improve online communication by helping users convey and assess availability, but they also let users infer potentially sensitive information about one another. We surveyed 200 smartphone users to understand the extent to which users are aware of information shared via OSIs and the extent to which this shapes their behavior. Despite familiarity with OSIs, participants misunderstand many aspects of OSIs, and they describe carefully curating and seeking to control their self-presentation via OSIs. Some users further report leveraging OSI-conveyed information for problematic and malicious purposes. Drawing on existing constructs of app dependence (i.e., when users contort their behavior to meet an app's demands) and app enablement (i.e., when apps enable users to engage in behaviors they feel good about), we demonstrate that current OSI design patterns promote app dependence, and we call for a shift toward OSI designs that are more enabling for users.

Abstract Online status indicators (or OSIs, i.e., interface elements that communicate whether a user is online) can leak potentially sensitive information about users. In this work, we analyze 184 mobile applications to systematically characterize the existing design space of OSIs. We identified 40 apps with OSIs across a variety of genres and conducted a design review of the OSIs in each, examining both Android and iOS versions of these apps. We found that OSI design decisions clustered into four major categories, namely: appearance, audience, settings, and fidelity to actual user behavior. Less than half of these apps allow users change the default settings for OSIs. Informed by our findings, we discuss: 1) how these design choices support adversarial behavior, 2) design guidelines for creating consistent, privacy-conscious OSIs, and 3) a set of novel design concepts for building future tools to augment users’ ability to control and understand the presence information they broadcast. By connecting the common design patterns we document to prior work on privacy in social technologies, we contribute an empirical understanding of the systematic ways in which OSIs can make users more or less vulnerable to unwanted information disclosure.

Strengthening early executive function (EF) skills has the potential to improve an individual's quality of life throughout their lifetime, a fact that has led to many EF-training suites. In this work, we empirically investigate how children and parents engaged with Cookie Monster's Challenge (CMC), a tablet game designed to train EF in preschoolers. Through analysis of child-parent co-play with CMC, we describe children's and parents' thematic behaviors, documenting their effective and ineffective strategies for engaging with the game, particularly when it challenged children's EF skills. We further show that these behaviors led to a small but significant short-term increase in an unrelated EF task. Drawing on these patterns of interaction, we propose design directions for EF training interfaces, such as increasing contextual relevance and specific forms of scaffolding. Our work is the first illustration of how preschoolers exercise their EF and inhibitory control by collaboratively using a commercial tablet app together with a parent.

We investigate how families repair communication breakdowns with digital home assistants. We recruited 10 diverse families to use an Amazon Echo Dot in their homes for four weeks. All families had at least one child between four and 17 years old. Each family participated in pre- and post- deployment interviews. Their interactions with the Echo Dot (Alexa) were audio recorded throughout the study. We analyzed 59 communication breakdown interactions between family members and Alexa, framing our analysis with concepts from HCI and speech-language pathology. Our findings indicate that family members collaborate using discourse scaffolding (supportive communication guidance) and a variety of speech and language modifications in their attempts to repair communication breakdowns with Alexa. Alexa's responses also influence the repair strategies that families use. Designers can relieve the communication repair burden that primarily rests with families by increasing digital home assistants' abilities to collaborate together with users to repair communication breakdowns.

Through focus groups (n=61) and surveys (n=2,083) of parents and teens, we investigated how parents and their teen children experience their own and each other's phone use in the context of parent-teen relationships. Both expressed a lack of agency in their own and each other's phone use, feeling overly reliant on their own phone and displaced by the other's phone. In a classic example of the fundamental attribution error, each party placed primary blame on the other, and rationalized their own behavior with legitimizing excuses. We present a conceptual model showing how parents' and teens' relationships to their phones and perceptions of each other's phone use are inextricably linked, and how, together, they contribute to parent-teen tensions and disconnections. We use the model to consider how the phone might play a less highly charged role in family life and contribute to positive connections between parents and their teen children.

Many traditional HCI methods, such as surveys and interviews, are of limited value when working with preschoolers. In this paper, we present anchored audio sampling (AAS), a remote data collection technique for extracting qualitative audio samples during field deployments with young children. AAS offers a developmentally sensitive way of understanding how children make sense of technology and situates their use in the larger context of daily life. AAS is defined by an anchor event, around which audio is collected. A sliding window surrounding this anchor captures both antecedent and ensuing recording, providing the researcher insight into the activities that led up to the event of interest as well as those that followed. We present themes from three deployments that leverage this technique. Based on our experiences using AAS, we have also developed a reusable open-source library for embedding AAS into any Android application.

Many smartphone users engage in compulsive and habitual phone checking they find frustrating, yet our understanding of how this phenomenon is experienced is limited. We conducted a semi-structured interview, a think-aloud phone-use demonstration, and a sketching exercise with 39 smartphone users (ages 14-64) to probe their experiences with compulsive phone checking. Their insights revealed a small taxonomy of common triggers that lead up to instances of compulsive phone use and a second set that end compulsive phone use sessions. Though participants expressed frustration with their lack of self-control, they also reported that the activities they engage in during these sessions can be meaningful, which they defined as transcending the current instance of use. Participants said they periodically reflect on their compulsive use and delete apps that drive compulsive checking without providing sufficient meaning. We use these findings to create a descriptive model of the cycle of compulsive checking, and we call on designers to craft experiences that meet users' definition of meaningfulness rather than creating lock-out mechanisms to help them police their own use.

In HCI, adult concerns about technologies for children have been studied extensively. However, less is known about what children themselves find concerning in everyday technologies. We examine children's technology-related fears by probing their use of the colloquial term "creepy." To understand children's perceptions of "creepy technologies," we conducted four participatory design sessions with children (ages 7 - 11) to design and evaluate creepy technologies, followed by interviews with the same children. We found that children's fear reactions emphasized physical harm and threats to their relationships (particularly with attachment figures). The creepy signals from technology the children described include: deception, lack of control, mimicry, ominous physical appearance, and unpredictability. Children acknowledged trusted adults will mediate the relationship between creepy technology signals and fear responses. Our work contributes a close examination of what children mean when they say a technology is "creepy." By treating these concerns as principal design considerations, developers can build systems that are more transparent about the risks they produce and more sensitive to the fears they may unintentionally raise.

We present an evaluation of three prototype tangible user interfaces (TUIs) for mealtimes for preschoolers. Building on past work identifying value tensions between adults' and children's perspectives at meals, we evaluated TUIs to address different tensions in this context (for example, the tension between children's interest in experimenting with food versus adults' interest in cleanliness). Thirteen pre-school children and their parents tried out the prototypes, as did an additional seven preschool teachers. Adults and children alike were excited by the prototypes; parents were surprised by children's increased food intake, and children used the prototypes to engage in artistic expression with food traces. However, children's increased consumption was extrinsically motivated by the prototypes rather than intrinsically motivated by hunger. We conclude that TUIs have the potential to enhance shared meals between children and adults but also have the potential to distract or persuade children in inappropriate ways. We present design guidance differentiating these two outcomes, such as incorporating the TUI into pre-existing mealtime objects and routines.

Early childhood is a critical developmental period when children's experiences have lasting impacts on long-term outcomes. Thus, an evidence-based understanding of how technology can support early childhood education (ECE) classrooms promises to be disproportionately useful to children's long-term wellbeing. We conducted an observational study at ten child-care centers, complemented by interviews with teachers and directors. Using a Uses and Gratifications (U&G) perspective, we found that the gratifications teachers seek when they incorporate technology into the classroom cluster into six categories, such as encouraging technology literacy, regulating children's behavior, and supporting child autonomy. Using these themes, we contribute a set of design priorities for supporting this population. We also contribute an expansion of the U&G perspective to include: 1) gratifications resisted, to account for the ways in which teachers resist gratifying uses of technology, and 2) differentiation between direct gratifications and indirect gratifications to better describe technology use in collaborative contexts.

Most technology designed for young children at mealtime centers around conceptions of how the child should eat or behave at the table. Expanding this view to include children's perspectives, we present a two-part study to explore the design of technology for mealtimes in preschools. We first worked to identify existing value tensions through interviews and observations, then designed three prototypes to address different value tensions (e.g., the tension between children's interest in experimenting with food versus the teachers' interest in cleanliness). Although there are specific ways adults' and children's values are in conflict, our work suggests the potential for novel designs to provide creative and meaningful experiences such as playful productivity that support the needs of both parties.

In this study, we examine the conversational repair strategies that preschoolers use to correct communication breakdowns with a voice-driven interface. We conducted a two-week deployment in the homes of 14 preschoolers of a tablet game that included a broken voice-driven mini-game. We collected 107 audio samples of these children's (unsuccessful) attempts to communicate with the mini-game. We found that children tried a common set of repair strategies, including repeating themselves and experimenting with the tone and pronunciation of their words. Children were persistent, rarely giving up on the interaction, asking for help, or showing frustration. When parents participated in the interaction, they moved through four phases of engagement: first making suggestions, then intervening, then making statements of resignation, and finally pronouncing that the interaction could not be repaired. Designers should anticipate that in this context, children will borrow behaviors from person-to-person communication, such as pivoting strategies to probe the source of failed communication and structuring communication into turn-taking attempts.

In this study, we present Coco's Videos, a video-viewing platform for preschoolers designed to support them in learning to self-manage their media consumption. We report results from a three-week experimental deployment in 24 homes in which preschoolers used three different versions of the platform: one that is neutral to the limits they set, one that enforces the limits they set, and one that attempts to erode the limits they set by automatically playing additional content after the planned content is finished ("post-play"). We found that post-play significantly reduced children's autonomy and likelihood of self-regulation, extended video-viewing time, and led to increases in parent intervention. We found that the lock-out mechanism did not reduce video-viewing time or the likelihood of parent intervention. Together, our results suggest that avoiding platforms that work to undermine the user's intentions is more likely to help children self-regulate their media use than rigid parental controls.

Play is an enjoyable and developmentally useful part of early childhood, and parent-child play is a highly productive mechanism by which children learn to participate in the world. We conducted an observational lab study to examine how 15 parent-child pairs (children age 4-6) respond to and play with tablet apps as compared to analog toys. We found that parents and children were less likely to engage with each other or to respond to each other's bids for attention during play sessions with tab-lets versus play sessions with toys. We also observed that specific design features of tablet devices and children's apps-such as one-sided interfaces, game paradigms that demand continual attention, and lack of support for parallel interaction-are the primary mechanism shaping these differences. We provide guidance suggesting how children's apps might be re-designed to preserve the ad-vantages of digital play experiences while also evolving to build in the advantages of traditional toys.

Global app marketplaces make families in foreign countries easily accessible to developers, but most scholarship on joint media engagement (JME) between parents and children reports on data from participants in Western contexts. We conducted an observational lab study to examine how preschoolers (age 3-5) and parents (N=74) from three different regions of the world (communities in China, Taiwan, and the United States) engage with two types of tablet games: an instructional game with goals and an exploratory, open-ended game. We found systematic differences among groups and between games. For example, parents from China and Taiwan frequently picked up their child's hand and used it as a tool to engage with the screen, a practice parents in our U.S. sample did not employ. Dyads from all three samples exhibited more warmth when playing an instructional game than an exploratory one. Our results suggest that characteristics of the populations we sampled interact with design features, that is, the same design prompted opposing behaviors in different groups. We conclude that it may be useful to examine goal-free and goal-oriented JME as separate constructs, that design choices influence the roles parents adopt during JME, and that the range of behaviors we observed complicate the prevailing research narrative of what positive and productive JME looks like.

Parental controls allow parents to set limits on children's use of technology, but prior work suggests that controlling children alone is unlikely to foster the development of healthy media habits. We took elements from evidence-based preschool curricula that teach self-regulation and translated them to the digital space by creating a tool for preschoolers and parents to plan their device-based playtime. In an observational lab study with 11 parent-child dyads and follow-up interviews with 14 parents, we found that children demonstrated intentionality and made goal-directed choices as they planned, the mediating factor in developing self-regulation. We observed that parents prompted their child to be intentional and solicited children's input. When children played through their plan, they transitioned to the next activity without intervention 93% of the time. Our results suggest that evidence-based practices for teaching self-regulation in a non-digital context can be applied productively to children's use of technology. As parents supported children in trying the tool for the first time, a further contribution of this work is a hierarchical model of parents' approaches to scaffolding children's use of a novel technology.

Overselectivity is a learning challenge that is largely unaddressed in the assistive technology community. Screening and intervention, done by specialists, is time-intensive and requires substantial training. Little to no treatments are available to the broader population of preliterate, minimally verbal individuals. In this work, we examine the impact of an iPad game based on the tenets of behavioral therapy to mitigate overselectivity. We developed software-based techniques and evaluated the system using established methods from the field of Special Education. We present the results of a deployment in a special education school that demonstrates that an assistive tablet game is a feasible means of addressing overselectivity, and we present generalizable technological features drawn from evidenced-based therapies to consider in future assistive technologies. We suggest that designers of assistive technology systems, particularly those who address physical, cognitive, and behavioral difficulties for preliterate AAC users, should consider overselectivity as a potential co-occurring condition.

In this case study, we describe a design workshop with 7 children age 4-6 using existing co-design techniques known to elicit design insights in older individuals. We found that our 5- and 6-year-old participants successfully generated design ideas using these methods, while 4-year-olds were unable to use create solutions in a traditional format. How-ever, these younger children enthusiastically offered opportunities where, with methodological guidance, the research-er could have followed the child's lead and shifted the design question to one that was potentially more meaningful for the participant. We propose a future work to examine the effectiveness of giving these younger participants great-er authority in defining and scoping the problem space.

Though prior work shows parents worry about screen media experiences displacing physical activity and time outdoors, this research does not account for location-based mobile games like Pokémon GO, which specifically facilitate outdoor activity. To fill this gap in the research, we surveyed and interviewed parents to understand (1) their values and perceptions of this type of gameplay and (2) how they co-play Pokémon GO with their children. Our findings provide empirical evidence that, in addition to appreciating the increased exercise and time outdoors, parents valued how play led to family bonding experiences. Furthermore, some traditional concerns about screen time persisted in this context, and new concerns about safety in real-world environments emerged. Parents mitigated these concerns with rules and gameplay choices, such as maintaining control of the mobile device, to ensure children were safe. This work contributes an empirical understanding of families as co-users of technology and offers a generative lens to study and design for joint media engagement among family members where gameplay differs from normative notions of screen time.

Many successful digital interfaces employ visual metaphors to convey features or data properties to users, but the characteristics that make a visual metaphor effective are not well understood. We used a theoretical conception of metaphor from cognitive linguistics to design an interactive system for viewing the citation network of the corpora of literature in the JSTOR database, a highly connected compound graph of 2 million papers linked by 8 million citations. We created 4 variants of this system, manipulating 2 distinct properties of metaphor. We conducted a between‐subjects experimental study with 80 participants to compare understanding and engagement when working with each version. We found that building on known image schemas improved response time on look‐up tasks, while contextual detail predicted increases in persistence and the number of inferences drawn from the data. Schema‐congruency combined with contextual detail produced the highest gains in comprehension. These findings provide concrete mechanisms by which designers presenting large data sets through metaphorical interfaces may improve their effectiveness and appeal with users.

Though many people report an interest in self-limiting certain aspects of their phone use, challenges adhering to self-defined limits are common. We conducted a design exercise and online survey to map the design space of interventions for smartphone non-use and distilled these into a small taxonomy of intervention categories. Using these findings, we implemented "MyTime," an intervention to support people in achieving goals related to smartphone non-use. We conducted a deployment study with 23 participants over two weeks and found that participants reduced their time with the apps they feel are a poor use of time by 21% while their use of the apps they feel are a good use of time remained unchanged. We found that a small taxonomy describes users' diverse set of desired behavior changes relating to smartphone non-use, and that these desired changes predict: 1) the hypothetical features they are interested in trying, 2) the extent to which they engage with these features in practice, and 3) their changes in behavior in response to the intervention. We link users' desired behaviors to the categories of our design taxonomy, providing a foundation for a theoretical model of designing for smartphone non-use.

Prior work shows that setting limits on young children's screen time is conducive to healthy development but can be a challenge for families. We investigate children's (age 1 - 5) transitions to and from screen-based activities to understand the boundaries families have set and their experiences living within them. We report on interviews with 27 parents and a diary study with a separate 28 families examining these transitions. These families turn on screens primarily to facilitate parents' independent activities. Parents feel this is appropriate but self-audit and express hesitation, as they feel they are benefiting from an activity that can be detrimental to their child's well-being. We found that families turn off screens when parents are ready to give their child their full attention and technology presents a natural stopping point. Transitioning away from screens is often painful, and predictive factors determine the pain of a transition. Technology-mediated transitions are significantly more successful than parent-mediated transitions, suggesting that the design community has the power to make this experience better for parents and children by creating technologies that facilitate boundary-setting and respect families' self-defined limits.

Parents and children both use technology actively and increasingly, but prior work shows that concerns about attention, family time, and family relationships abound. We conducted a survey with 249 parent-child pairs distributed across 40 U.S. states to understand the types of technology rules (also known as restrictive mediation) they have established in their family and how effective those rules are perceived to be. Our data robustly show that children (age 10-17) are more likely to follow rules that constrain technology activities (e.g., no Snapchat) than rules that constrain technology use in certain contexts (e.g., no phone at the dinner table). Children find context constraints harder to live up to, parents find them harder to enforce, and parents' most common challenge when trying to enforce such rules is that children -can't put it down.- This is consistent with the idea that banning certain technologies is currently easier than setting more nuanced boundaries. Parents and children agree that parents should also unplug when spending time with family, while children alone express frustration with the common parent practice of posting about children online. Together, our results suggest several mechanisms by which designers and families can improve parent-child relationships around technology use.

While people often use smartphones to achieve specific goals, at other times they use them out of habit or to pass the time. Uses and Gratifications Theory explains that users' motivations for engaging with technology can be divided into instrumental and ritualistic purposes. Instrumental uses of technology are goal-directed and purposeful, while ritualistic uses are habitual and diversionary. In this paper, we provide an empirical account of the nature of instrumental vs. ritualistic use of smartphones based on data collected from 43 Android users over 2 weeks through logging application use and collecting ESM survey data about the purpose of use. We describe the phone-use behaviors users exhibit when seeking instrumental and ritualistic gratifications, and we develop a classification scheme for predicting ritualistic vs. instrumental use with an accuracy of 77% for a general model, increasing to more than 97% with a sliding confidence threshold. We discuss how such a model might be used to improve the experience of smartphone users in application areas such as recommender systems and social media.

Though toddlers and preschoolers are regular touchscreen users, relatively little is known about how they learn to perform unfamiliar gestures. In this paper we assess the responses of 34 children, aged 2 to 5, to the most common in-app prompting techniques for eliciting specific gestures. By reviewing 100 touchscreen apps for preschoolers, we determined the types of prompts that children are likely to encounter. We then evaluated their relative effectiveness in teaching children to perform simple gestures. We found that children under 3 were only able to interpret instructions when they came from an adult model, but that children made rapid gains between age 3 and 3-and-a-half, at which point they were able to follow in-app audio instructions and on-screen demonstrations. The common technique of using visual state changes to prompt gestures was ineffective across this age range. Given that prior work in this space has primarily focused on children's fine motor control, our findings point to a need for increased attention to the design of prompts that accommodate children's cognitive development as well.

Child development research suggests that using phones while caring for children can be problematic, but limited prior work in this space makes defining appropriate use challenging. We conducted the first exploration of whether adults feel pressure to limit phone use in this context and whether they choose to do so. Through mixed methods, we collected data from 466 adult caregivers at playgrounds. We found that phone use was a small part of playground time, yet a notable source of guilt. Adults engaged in systematic and specific phone-use and phone-non-use behaviors in order to prioritize their children above themselves. Our results indicate that caregiver values and self-control together predict behavior and can be used to model phone use in this context. Users' mixed success with engaging in intentional periods of non-use suggests that a design agenda which prioritizes cycles of engagement, disengagement, and re-engagement may be of value to this group.

The tracking of developmental milestones in young children is an important public health goal for ensuring early detection and treatment for developmental delay. While numerous paper-based and web-based solutions are available for tracking milestones, many busy parents often forget to enter information on a regular basis. To help address this need, we have developed an interactive system called @BabySteps for allowing parents who use Twitter to track and respond to tweets about developmental milestones using a special hashtag syntax. Parent responses are parsed automatically and written into a central database that can be accessed via the web. We deployed @BabySteps with 14 parents over a 3-week period and found that parents were able to learn how to use the system to track their children's progress, with some using it to communicate with other parents. The study helped to identify a number of ways to improve the approach, including simplifying the hashtag syntax, allowing for private responses via direct messaging, and improving the social component. We provide a discussion of lessons learned and suggestions for the design of interactive public health systems.

In this paper, we describe the design of a therapeutic video game suite for early elementary children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The purpose of this work is to present our hypothesis that games that are both fun and faithful to evidence-based therapies could serve as a mechanism to reduce the gap between the amount of therapy recommended for children with ASD and the amount they receive. We describe our process of creating a suite of games modeled on Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT), a technique known to be effective in educating children with ASD. We also describe early indicators of game engagement and outline planned future work to test the games' efficacy as therapeutic tools.