Misinformation has become a regular occurrence in our lives with many different approaches being sought to address it. One effective way to combat misinformation is for trusted individuals (e.g., family members) to challenge the misinformed person. However, less is known about how these conversations between trusted individuals occur, and how they may impact on relationships. We look to address this gap by conducting semi-structured interviews with family members in the UK who have experienced misinformation within their family networks. We identify several barriers individuals face when challenging misinformed family members, such as the misinformed person’s personality and the extent that pre-conceptions influence beliefs. We also find individuals developing strategies to overcome these barriers, and to cope with difficulties that arise through these conversations. Despite technology being the main driver for misinformation spread, we find it has limitations when used to facilitate or mediate conversations for challenging misinformation between family members.

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

Online freelancing platforms, such as Upwork, hold great promise in enabling flexible work opportunities where freelancers can combine their work with other life responsibilities, hereafter work-life. However, prior research suggests that platform features and self-managing demands of freelance work can jeopardise this apparent flexibility. In this paper, we report findings from a qualitative study, combining a 14-diary and semi-structured interview with 15 Upwork freelancers. We explored online freelancers' work practices, challenges, and the impact of platform features on their everyday lives. Our qualitative data suggest that platform features and individual context shape online freelancers' work-life practices. Freelancers develop strategies to mitigate platforms' constraints and balance their individual preferences and responsibilities. Further, our findings illustrate how platform features challenge freelancers' availability expectations, work autonomy, and work detachment. This paper contributes an empirical understanding of the factors influencing online freelancers' work-life practices by drawing upon Wanda J. Orlikowski's Structuration Model of Technology. This theoretical lens renders the interplay of freelancers, platforms, and instituted norms of freelance work.

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

Reflection is an important precursor to attitude and behavior change, but existing advice on designing for reflection in games is mixed and requires further empirical investigation. We report on the design and evaluation (n=32) of a game to prompt student reflection on work-life balance. Participants played as themselves or a third person character (Alex). An inductive qualitative analysis of post-play interviews, and a follow-up one week later, resulted in four themes relating to how gameplay facilitated reflection: making (sensible) consequences visible; it's like MY life; the space between Alex and I; and triggers in everyday life. A deductive qualitative analysis also indicated that while both games resulted in different forms of reflection for the majority of players, those who role-played as Alex appeared more likely to experience higher levels of reflection. Through exploring the ways in which the two versions of the game succeeded, and failed, to support reflection, we highlight the importance of providing a relevant context to players (so the game feels close to their experience), and allowing them to role-play as someone other than themselves (but not too close).

Since entering the HCI lexicon in the 1990s, Probes have been interpreted and used in divergent ways as a designerly approach to research. While originally positioned as a critique of dominant user-research methods, literature on Probes rarely reflects on such critical dimensions nor explicitly articulates the intents of using Probes as research artifacts. We conducted interviews with 12 design researchers who have worked with Probes within diverse Research through Design projects, exploring direct accounts of how and why Probes are used in practice. Our interviews brought to the fore the critical concerns behind Probe practices in relation to the language of Probing, relationships with participants, and motivations to challenge normative practices. While the pluralistic interpretations of Probes offered by our participants brings challenges, we discuss how making visible the critical motivations of our research opens up new ways of practicing and disseminating Probes.

Freelancing platforms, such as Upwork, represent an expansion of the gig economy to encompass knowledge-based work. Prior research in HCI has primarily focused on forms of gig work such as ride-sharing and microwork but has not addressed how freelancing platforms are disrupting high-skilled knowledge work. To understand freelancers’ perspectives on how these platforms are disrupting their work we have collected and thematically analysed 528 posts with 7499 comments from four relevant subforums on Reddit. The qualitative findings reveal tensions between wanting autonomy and control and the necessity of opportunities and convenience. Freelancing platforms are perceived as systems that present advantages to find clients, gain experience and mitigate precarity. However, these platforms constrain the control over their work that freelancers value. The paper contributes an improved understanding of freelance work, the role and potential for freelancing platforms in the knowledge-based gig economy, and directions for worker-centred design.

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

In this introduction to the special issue on First-Person Methods in (Human-Computer Interaction) HCI, we present a brief overview of first-person methods, their origin, and their use in Human-Computer Interaction. We also detail the difference between first-person methods, second-person, and third-person methods, as a way to guide the reader when engaging the special issue articles. We articulate our motivation for putting together this special issue: we wanted a collection of works that would allow HCI researchers to develop further, define, and outline practices, techniques and implications of first-person methods. We trace links between the articles in this special issue and conclude with questions and directions for future work in this methodological space: working with boundaries, risk, and accountability.

Many men stop exercising as they age, engage in risky behaviours such as alcohol misuse, are reluctant to admit to mental health problems, and avoid seeking help. Men are generally hard to reach for community health interventions. However, interventions run at football clubs have successfully engaged men and have led to positive health outcomes. Mobile health technology might similarly be designed to engage and encourage men via connections with football. This technology could be used to augment and extend community programs, or be used to target global fan bases. However, it is not clear if and how what attracts men to community interventions can translate to technology. In this paper we report a design study with 18 middle-age male participants exploring what men find important in football, and connections between football, health and technology. We present five design opportunities to guide and prompt further innovation in this area.

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

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

Email is far from dead; in fact the volume of messages exchanged daily, the number of accounts per user, and the number of devices on which email is accessed have been constantly growing. Most previous studies on email have focused on management and retrieval behaviour within a single account and on a single device. In this paper, we examine how people find email in today's ecosystem through an in-depth qualitative diary study with 16 participants. We found that personal and work accounts are managed differently, resulting in diverse retrieval strategies: while work accounts are more structured and thus email is retrieved through folders, personal accounts have fewer folders and users rely primarily on the built-in search option. Moreover, retrieval occurs primarily on laptops and PCs compared to smartphones. We explore the reasons, and uncover barriers and workarounds related to managing multiple accounts and devices. Finally, we consider new design possibilities for email clients to better support how email is used today.

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

In my PhD research I am exploring the effect of email on work-home boundaries. The ultimate goal is to design a tool that helps people manage their email better and reduces the stress associated with this activity. I argue that this will require understanding individual differences in email behaviours and how email can impact work-home boundaries.