Creating new products, services and research topics requires harnessing the best ideas from a broad set of cross-functional stakeholders who are creatively working together. Brainstorming workshops are powerful tools for developing design solutions or interventions, creating empathy, driving alignment, decision making and prioritization, and also for creating a deep understanding across a diverse group of creators. However, holding useful and energizing brainstorming workshops can be challenging given the variety of stakeholders and their ways of problem solving – made even more so with remote or hybrid work teams. This “Workshop on Brainstorming Workshops” is designed to highlight and model effective tools and best practices for practitioners to drive their own useful design thinking based brainstorming workshops in a fully remote or hybrid environment. We expect to share real world brainstorming techniques, trainings and templates from embedded researchers at Meta, sharing our insights and best practices, as well as facilitating a space for sharing of all participants’ insights around these challenges. Additionally, we expect to create a space to learn together and improve practitioners’ techniques.

Scholars, journalists, and other commentators argue that many parts of the world, including the US, are suffering a social-epistemological crisis, sometimes called "post-truth," and that this crisis is related to the fragmentation of newsmedia. The conventional media effects research explanation for this relationship between news and "post-truth" is framed in terms of messages and information-especially misinformation-as the mechanism by which communication effects change. Analysing the results of a large (n = 164) interview study on mobile and other digital news audiencehood, this article presents an alternative, complementary explanation focused on ritual functions of communication. The primary method of affinity analysis of interview data identified a number of recurring themes: people's preferences, methods, and patterns of news consumption exhibit wild diversity beyond easy summary, but they share the experience of news as nearly ubiquitous, and often as excessive and therefore in need of management. Strategies for managing news broadly fell into categories of news avoidance and active research. Perhaps the most consistent observation across participants' accounts, however, is a conspicuous absence of other people, with news managed and confronted alone. Those findings are interpreted through James Carey's ritual theory of communication, which argues that meaning emerges not only through transmission of messages and information, but also through people's shared experiences of participating in the ritual processes of communication. This work makes a parallel argument that media fragmentation has been implicated in social-epistemological breakdown not only through the mechanism of messages and (mis)information, but also through the transformation and, in certain cases, loss of shared news rituals. The combination of large-scale interview research with media ritual analysis led to these insights about the cultural relevance and collective implications of people's experiences of ubiquitous news and the avoidance thereof.

A common practice in HCI research is to conduct a survey to understand the generalizability of findings from smaller-scale qualitative research. These surveys are typically deployed to convenience samples, on low-cost platforms such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk or Survey Monkey, or to more expensive market research panels offered by a variety of premium firms. Costs can vary widely, from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the platform used. We set out to understand the accuracy of ten different survey platforms/panels compared to ground truth data for a total of 6,007 respondents on 80 different aspects of demographic and behavioral questions. We found several panels that performed significantly better than others on certain topics, while different panels provided longer and more relevant open-ended responses. Based on this data, we highlight the benefits and pitfalls of using a variety of survey distribution options in terms of the quality, efficiency, and representative nature of the respondents and the types of responses that can be obtained.

The news landscape has been changing dramatically over the past few years. Whereas news once came from a small set of highly edited sources, now people can find news from thousands of news sites online, through a variety of channels such as web search, social media, email newsletters, or direct browsing. We set out to understand how Americans read news online using web browser logs collected from 174 diverse participants. We found that 20% of all news sessions started with a web search, that 16% started from social media, that 61% of news sessions only involved a single news domain, and that 47% of our participants read news from both sides of the political spectrum. We conclude with key implications for online news, social media, and search sites to encourage more balanced news browsing.

As non-binary genders become increasingly prevalent, researchers face decisions in how to collect, analyze and interpret research participants' genders. We present two case studies on surveys with thousands of respondents, of which hundreds reported gender as something other than simply women or men. First, Tumblr, a blogging platform, resulted in a rich set of gender identities with very few aggressive or resistive responses; the second case study, online Fantasy Football, yielded opposite proportions. By focusing on variation rather than dismissing non-binary responses as noise, we suggest that researchers can better capture gender in a way that 1) addresses gender variation without othering or erasing non-binary respondents; and 2) minimizes "trolls'" opportunity to use surveys as a mischief platform. The analyses of these two distinct case studies find significant gender differences in community dimensions of participation in both networked spaces as well as offering a model for inclusive mixed-methods HCI research.

With recent shifts from email to messaging apps for personal communication, many communication partners are no longer able to converse using multiple threads within one platform as they used to via email. Romantic couples are the most frequently messaged contacts on mobile and communicate about a wide range of topics with each other, need to make joint decisions, and may have several roles in relation to each other (e.g., spouse, co-parent). Through a 3-week field study with ten U.S. diverse couples we studied how couples use a messaging app that allows them to compartmentalize their conversations into multiple "channels" around topics of their choice. We detail how couples managed and used channels in daily life, and channels' strengths and limitations. We found that channels made couples feel more organized, and helped with finding content and keeping track of topics. However, it was sometimes difficult to choose or navigate channels. We discuss perceived impacts of channels on relationships (e.g., topic-switching during conflicts), and outline design opportunities for messaging apps.