Members of historically marginalized communities do not have equal access to formal health resources. Inequality in access to care leads to increased health disparity, meaning there is a gap in health between segments of the population. These inequalities affect members of marginalized communities physically, mentally, and emotionally. In this research we present the design of Bloomwood Stories: Block Party, a digital, visual novel game as an informal health resource that incorporates Bandura's self-efficacy design framework to improve player health knowledge. We discuss key design decisions for the player character (PC), non-player characters (NPCs), as well as lessons learned in designing for self-efficacy and designing for representation.

Contributors to open source software packages often describe feeling discouraged by the lack of positive feedback from users. This paper describes a technology probe, Hug Reports, that provides users a communication affordance within their code editors, through which users can convey appreciation to contributors of packages they use. In our field study, 18 users interacted with the probe for 3 weeks, resulting in messages of appreciation to 550 contributors, 26 of whom participated in subsequent research. Our findings show how locating a communication affordance within the code editor, and allowing users to express appreciation in terms of the abstractions they are exposed to (packages, modules, functions), can support exchanges of appreciation that are meaningful to users and contributors. Findings also revealed the moments in which users expressed appreciation, the two meanings that appreciation took on -- as a measure of utility and as an act of expressive communication -- and how contributors' reactions to appreciation were influenced by their perceived level of contribution. Based on these findings, we discuss opportunities and challenges for designing appreciation systems for open source in particular, and peer production communities more generally.

Immigrant English Language Learners (ELLs) who are learning the majority language in a new country are required to participate in the informal language space on a daily basis to gain access to essential economic and social resources. In contrast to formal language spaces, which extensive literature has researched, exploration of informal language spaces, which present a number of linguistic and psychological challenges without scaffolded support, remains limited. In this work, we conduct a qualitative interview study to explore the use of support tools to facilitate participation in daily life for ELLs, investigating the efficacy of these tools, obstacles encountered, and perceptions of what defines positive and negative experiences. We aim to contribute a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the experience of language use in practical scenarios for ELLs and present a set of actionable considerations for designers working with ELLs that prioritize their linguistic, affective, and social needs.

Voice assistants’ inability to serve people-of-color and non-native English speakers has largely been documented as a quality-of-service harm. However, little work has investigated what downstream harms propagate from this poor service. How does poor usability materially manifest and affect users’ lives? And what interaction designs might help users recover from these effects? We identify 6 downstream harms that propagate from quality-of-service harms in voice assistants. Through interviews and design activities with 16 multicultural participants, we unveil these 6 harms, outline how multicultural users uniquely personify their voice assistant, and suggest how these harms and personifications may affect their interactions. Lastly, we employ techniques from psychology on communication repair to contribute suggestions for harm-reducing repair that may be implemented in voice technologies. Our communication repair strategies include: identity affirmations (intermittent frequency), cultural sensitivity, and blame redirection. This work shows potential for a harm-repair framework to positively influence voice interactions.

Initiating conversations with new people at work is often intimidating because of uncertainty about their interests. People worry others may reject their attempts to initiate conversation or that others may not enjoy the conversation. We introduce a new system, Nooks, built on Slack, that reduces fear of social evaluation by enabling individuals to initiate any conversation as a nook—a conversation room that identifies its topic, but not its creator. Automatically convening others interested in the nook, Nooks further reduces fears of social evaluation by guaranteeing individuals in advance that others they are about to interact with are interested in the conversation. In a multi-month deployment with participants in a summer research program, Nooks provided participants with non-threatening and inclusive interaction opportunities, and ambient awareness, leading to new interactions online and offline. Our results demonstrate how intentionally designed social spaces can reduce fears of social evaluation and catalyze new workplace connections.

Language technologies have a racial bias, committing greater errors for Black users than for white users. However, little work has evaluated what effect these disparate error rates have on users themselves. The present study aims to understand if speech recognition errors in human-computer interactions may mirror the same effects as misunderstandings in interpersonal cross-race communication. In a controlled experiment (N=108), we randomly assigned Black and white participants to interact with a voice assistant pre-programmed to exhibit a high versus low error rate. Results revealed that Black participants in the high error rate condition, compared to Black participants in the low error rate condition, exhibited significantly higher levels of self-consciousness, lower levels of self-esteem and positive affect, and less favorable ratings of the technology. White participants did not exhibit this disparate pattern. We discuss design implications and the diverse research directions to which this initial study aims to contribute.

Reducing uncertainty around the nature of racist interactions is one of the key motivations driving individual behaviors for coping with those incidents. However, there are few appropriate technologies to support BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) in engaging in social uncertainty reduction around this vulnerable, sensitive topic. This paper reports on an exploratory design study investigating how social technology might facilitate uncertainty reduction through three “provotypes” - provocative prototypes of user-generated speculative design concepts. U.S.-based participants engaged with the provotypes through an interactive fiction to explore their usefulness in the context of a racist microaggression. Results showed that engaging the provotypes through interactive fiction facilitated complex and productive interactions and critiques. This work contributes a novel method for conducting exploratory design, remote user studies using interactive fiction as well as priorities, tensions, and further information what role, if any, technology might play in managing racist interactions.

The ultimate goal of automatic diet monitoring systems (ADM) is to make food journaling as easy as counting steps with a smartwatch. To achieve this goal, it is essential to understand the utility and usability of ADM systems in real-world settings. However, this has been challenging since many ADM systems perform poorly outside the research labs. Therefore, one of the main focuses of ADM research has been on improving ecological validity. This paper presents an evaluation of ADM’s utility and usability using an end-to-end system, FitNibble. FitNibble is robust to many challenges that real-world settings pose and provides just-in-time notifications to remind users to journal as soon as they start eating. We conducted a long-term field study to compare traditional self-report journaling and journaling with ADM in this evaluation. We recruited 13 participants from various backgrounds and asked them to try each journaling method for nine days. Our results showed that FitNibble improved adherence by significantly reducing the number of missed events (19.6% improvement, p =.0132). Results have shown that participants were highly dependent on FitNibble in maintaining their journals. Participants also reported increased awareness of their dietary patterns, especially with snacking. All these results highlight the potential of ADM in improving the food journaling experience.

When members of ad-hoc virtual teams need to collectively ideate or deliberate, they often fail to engage with each others' perspectives in a constructive manner. At best, this leads to sub-optimal outcomes, and, at worst, it can cause conflicts that lead to teams not wanting to continue working together. Prior work has attempted to facilitate constructive communication by highlighting problematic communication patterns and nudging teams to alter their interaction norms. However, these approaches achieve limited success because they fail to acknowledge two social barriers: (1) it is hard to reset team norms mid-interaction, and (2) corrective nudges have limited utility unless team members believe it is safe to voice their opinion and that their opinion will be heard. This paper introduces Empathosphere, a chat-embedded intervention to mitigate these barriers and foster constructive communication in teams. To mitigate the first barrier, Empathosphere leverages the known benefits of "experimental spaces" in dampening existing norms and creating a climate conducive to change. Empathosphere instantiates this "space'' as a separate communication channel in a team's workspace. To mitigate the second barrier, Empathosphere harnesses the benefits of perspective-taking to cultivate a group climate that promotes a norm of members speaking up and engaging with each other. Empathosphere achieves this by orchestrating authentic socio-emotional exchanges designed to induce perspective-taking. A controlled study ($N=110$) compared Empathosphere to an alternate intervention strategy of prompting teams to reflect on their team experience. We found that Empathosphere led to higher work satisfaction, encouraged more open communication and feedback within teams, and boosted teams' desire to continue working together. This work demonstrates that "experimental spaces," particularly those that integrate methods of encouraging perspective-taking, can be a powerful means of improving communication in virtual teams.

With the growing ubiquity of wearable devices, sensed physiological responses provide new means to connect with others. While recent research demonstrates the expressive potential for biosignals, the value of sharing these personal data remains unclear. To understand their role in communication, we created Significant Otter, an Apple Watch/iPhone app that enables romantic partners to share and respond to each other’s biosignals in the form of animated otter avatars. In a one-month study with 20 couples, participants used Significant Otter with biosignals sensing OFF and ON. We found that while sensing OFF enabled couples to keep in touch, sensing ON enabled easier and more authentic communication that fostered social connection. However, the addition of biosignals introduced concerns about autonomy and agency over the messages they sent. We discuss design implications and future directions for communication systems that recommend messages based on biosignals.

Ranging from subtle to overt, unintentional to systemic, navigating racism is additional everyday work for many people. Yet the needs of people who experience racism have been overlooked as a fertile ground for better technology. Through a series of workshops we call Foundational Fiction, we engaged BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) in participatory design to identify qualities of technology that can support people coping before, during, and after a racist interaction. Participants developed storyboards for digital tools that offer advice, predict consequences, identify racist remarks and intervene, educate both targets and perpetrators about interpersonal and systemic racism, and more. In the paper we present our workshop method utilizing interactive fiction, participants’ design concepts, prevalent themes (reducing uncertainty and offering comfort), and we provide critical analysis of the complexity of technology in these contexts. This work identifies specific opportunities for exploring anti-racist social tools.

Blindspot is a 2D web-based game that tells a story of a Chinese student newly arrived at an American university who experiences microaggressions in her college life. A prologue gives background information of the protagonist, followed by three chapters in different campus settings complete with puzzle games whose mechanics emphasize the microaggression topic of the chapter. Based on player dialogue choices, strategies for dealing with microaggressions may be followed or not, leading to different puzzles, with a hopeful ending presented to all. The narrative and game mechanics foster empathy with the protagonist, providing benefits for players in both marginalized and non-marginalized groups.

In the course of every member's integration into an online community, a decision must be made to participate for the first time. The challenges of effective recruitment, management, and retention of new users have been extensively explored in social computing research. However, little work has looked at in-the-moment factors that lead users to decide to participate instead of "lurk", conditions which can be shaped to draw new users in at crucial moments. In this work we analyze 183 million messages scraped from chatrooms on the livestreaming platform Twitch in order to understand differences between first-time participants' and regulars' behaviors and to identify conditions that encourage first-time participation. We find that presence of diverse types of users increases likelihood of new participation, with effects depending on the size of the community. We also find that information-seeking behaviors in first-time participation are negatively associated with retention in the short and medium term.

While the majority of research in chatbot design has focused on creating chatbots that engage with users one-on-one, less work has focused on the design of conversational agents for online communities. In this paper we present results from a three week test of a social chatbot in an established online community. During this study, the chatbot "grew up" from "birth" through its teenage years, engaging with community members and "learning" vocabulary from their conversations. We discuss the design of this chatbot, how users' interactions with it evolved over the course of the study, and how it impacted the community as a whole. We discuss how we addressed challenges in developing a chatbot whose vocabulary could be shaped by users, and conclude with implications for the role of machine learning in social interactions in online communities and potential future directions for design of community-based chatbots.

Over 35% of Americans belong to racial minority groups. Racism targeting these individuals results in a range of harmful physical, psychological, and practical consequences. The present work aims to shed light on the current sense-making and support-seeking practices exhibited by targets of racism, as well as to identify the core needs and barriers that future socio-technical interventions could potentially address. The long-term goal of this work is to understand how CSCW researchers and designers could best support members of marginalized groups to make sense of and to seek support for experiences with racism. Narrative episode interviews with targets of racism revealed a number of key entry points for intervention. For example, participants' personal stories confirmed that uncertainty, both about the nature and consequences of the experience of racism, is a key motivator for support-seeking. In addition, despite the need for support, participants largely do not trust public forms of social media for support-seeking. We discuss how participants' accounts of the complex labor involved in determining who "gets it" in identifying potential supporters, and in navigating the complexities of trust and agency in sharing their experiences, present clear implications for the design of new socio-technical platforms for members of racial minority groups.

While past work has admirably supported crowd workers in improving their work performance, we argue that there is also value in designing for enjoyment untied from work outcomes--- what we call "tangential play.'' To this end, we present Turker Tales, a Google Chrome extension that uses tangential play to encourage crowd workers to write, share, and view short tales as a side activity to their main job on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Turker Tales introduces a layer of playful narrativization atop typical crowd work tasks in order to alter workers' experiences of those tasks without aiming to improve work efficiency or quality. Using speed-dating (N=12) and a pilot test (N=150) to inform our design, we deployed Turker Tales over one week with 171 participants, receiving 1,096 tales and 1,527 ratings of those tales. We found that our system of tangential play brought to light underlying conflicts (such as unfair working conditions), and provided a space for participants to reveal aspects of themselves and their shared experiences. Through Turker Tales, we critically reflect on the roles of researchers, designers, and requesters in crowd work, and the ethics of incorporating play into crowd work, and consider the implications of the paradigm we introduce both as a method of research through design and as a direction for design to support crowd workers.

Ensuring high-quality, civil social interactions remains a vexing challenge in many online spaces. In the present work, we introduce a novel approach to address this problem: using psychologically "embedded'' CAPTCHAs containing stimuli intended to prime positive emotions and mindsets. An exploratory randomized experiment (N = 454 Mechanical Turk workers) tested the impact of eight new CAPTCHA designs implemented on a simulated, politically charged comment thread. Results revealed that the two interventions that were the most successful at activating positive affect also significantly increased the positivity of tone and analytical complexity of argumentation in participants' responses. A focused follow-up experiment (N = 120 Mechanical Turk workers) revealed that exposure to CAPTCHAs featuring image sets previously validated to evoke low-arousal positive emotions significantly increased the positivity of sentiment and the levels of complexity and social connectedness in participants' posts. We offer several explanations for these results and discuss the practical and ethical implications of designing interfaces to influence discourse in online forums.

Chatbots have grown as a space for research and development in recent years due both to the realization of their commercial potential and to advancements in language processing that have facilitated more natural conversations. However, nearly all chatbots to date have been designed for dyadic, one-on-one communication with users. In this paper we present a comprehensive review of research on chatbots supplemented by a review of commercial and independent chatbots. We argue that chatbots' social roles and conversational capabilities beyond dyadic interactions have been underexplored, and that expansion into this design space could support richer social interactions in online communities and help address the longstanding challenges of maintaining, moderating, and growing these communities. In order to identify opportunities beyond dyadic interactions, we used research-through-design methods to generate more than 400 concepts for new social chatbots, and we present seven categories that emerged from analysis of these ideas.

We explore the potential for expressive biosignals, or displays of sensed physiological data as social cues, to influence perceptions of a member of a stigmatized group. In a between-subjects experiment (N=62) participants read a fictional interview with a drug addict in prison, and rated their empathy and closeness with the interviewee. Participants were randomly assigned to read either 1) the transcript of the interview by itself, 2) the transcript with a text description of the interviewee's heart rate, or 3) the transcript with a graph of the interviewee's heart rate. Results demonstrate that providing information about heart rate can increase empathy in terms of emotional perspective-taking. Additionally, visualizing the heart rate as a graph, as opposed to text, can increase closeness. We discuss the implications of these results and present suggestions for future directions.

Research in computer-supported cooperative work has historically focused on behaviors of individuals at scale, using frames of interpersonal interaction such as Goffman's theories of self-presentation. These framings result in research detailing characteristics, personal identities, and behaviors of large numbers of connected and interacting individuals, while the social identity concepts that lead to intra- and inter-group dynamics have received less attention. We argue that the emergent properties of self-categorization and social identity, which are particularly fluid and complex in online spaces, provide a complementary perspective with which to re-examine traditional topics in social computing. We discuss the applicability of the Social Identity Perspective to established and new research domains in CSCW, proposing alternative perspectives on self-presentation, social support, collaboration, conflict, and leadership. We note methodological considerations emerging from this theory. Finally, we consider how broad concepts and lessons from the Social Identity Perspective might inspire CSCW work in the future.

In this study, we consider what Nintendo's widely downloaded Miitomo mobile application, which simultaneously promotes non-idealized self-fictionalization and authentic self-presentation, can suggest to us about self-presentation and technology design. Ten groups of four friends each (N=40), all novice users, engaged with Miitomo for one week, and completed supplementary pre- and post-use surveys. The data were analyzed to assess the extent to which participants' engagement in Miitomo reflected their "real life" selves and correlated with in-app and "real life" features, respectively. Although most participants believed that their behaviors within the app accurately reflected their "true selves," we found that in-app traits generally correlated more strongly with Miitomo engagement patterns than did users' "real life" traits and qualities. We discuss implications for social network and online community design, and propose future plans to study authenticity and self-distancing in online self-presentation.

We are exploring the concept of expressive biosignals: leveraging wearable technologies to introduce sensed physiological data as cues for social perception. Biosignals can help us achieve a deeper understanding of each other by revealing or clarifying the psychological processes that underlie our subjective experience. We conducted an exploratory study investigating expressive biosignals, comparing the influence of a variety of brain activity visualizations on impression formation. Results revealed that while participants readily infer emotional and cognitive states from visualized brain activity, the ambiguity of the data can lead to diverse perceptions and interpretations. Participants also expressed concerns that the observation of another individual's data during interaction might be invasive or distracting. We present a set of design considerations addressing issues of interpretability, integration, and privacy of biosignals in interpersonal contexts.

The present research investigated whether digital and non-digital platforms activate differing default levels of cognitive construal. Two initial randomized experiments revealed that individuals who completed the same information processing task on a digital mobile device (a tablet or laptop computer) versus a non-digital platform (a physical print-out) exhibited a lower level of construal, one prioritizing immediate, concrete details over abstract, decontextualized interpretations. This pattern emerged both in digital platform participants' greater preference for concrete versus abstract descriptions of behaviors as well as superior performance on detail-focused items (and inferior performance on inference-focused items) on a reading comprehension assessment. A pair of final studies found that the likelihood of correctly solving a problem-solving task requiring higher-level "gist" processing was: (1) higher for participants who processed the information for task on a non-digital versus digital platform and (2) heightened for digital platform participants who had first completed an activity activating an abstract mindset, compared to (equivalent) performance levels exhibited by participants who had either completed no prior activity or completed an activity activating a concrete mindset.

With an increasing reliance on crowdsourcing games as data-gathering tools, it is imperative to understand how to motivate and sustain high levels of voluntary contribution. To this end, the present work directly compared the impact of various "emphasis frames," highlighting distinct intrinsic motivational factors, used to describe an online game in which players provide descriptive metadata "tags" for digitized images. An initial study showed that, compared to frames emphasizing personal enjoyment or altruistic motivations, a frame emphasizing a "growing community of players" solicited significantly fewer contributions. A second study tested the hypothesis that this lower level of contribution resulted from social loafing (the tendency to exert less effort in collective tasks in which contributions are anonymous and pooled). Results revealed that, compared to a no-frame control condition, a frame emphasizing the preponderance of other players reduced contribution levels and game replay likelihood, whereas a frame emphasizing the scarcity of fellow players increased contribution and replay levels. Various strategies for counteracting social loafing in crowdsourcing contexts are discussed.