Creating information technologies intended for broad use that allow everyone to participate safely online—which we refer to as inclusive digital safety —requires understanding and addressing the digital-safety needs of a diverse range of users who face elevated risk of technology-facilitated attacks or disproportionate harm from such attacks—i.e., at-risk users . This article draws from more than 9 years of our work at Google to understand and support the digital safety of at-risk users—including survivors of intimate partner abuse, people involved with political campaigns, content creators, youth, and more—in technology intended for broad use. Among our learnings is that designing for inclusive digital safety across widely varied user needs and dynamic contexts is a wicked problem with no “correct” solution. Given this, we describe frameworks and design principles we have developed to help make at-risk research findings practically applicable to technologies intended for broad use and lessons we have learned about communicating them to practitioners.

Having children as passengers in a car influences the parents' experience of driving. Concern for their safety often supersedes other considerations. When designing in-car solutions to address the special needs of children as passengers, one could aim for assisting the parents with this task. For such systems, it is important that the proposed solution is able to engage the children and keeps them from distracting the driver, while offering the children an interesting and meaningful way to spend their time in the car. We propose and evaluate a conceptual design that involves an interactive, full-speech companion that uses information from the drive to entertain and educate children. Our evaluation reveals that a robot companion is able to engage the children more than a similar system without a physical companion, giving them an entity to direct their interactions to. This finding makes it a worthwhile consideration for designers to add such components to their solutions.

We present a concept for an in-car system to support unwinding after work. It consists of a mood sensing steering wheel, an interactive in-car environment and a tangible input device. The in-car environment incorporates a basic state that uses color to relax or energize the driver, and an exploratory state that intends to immerse the user into a simulated environment. In the exploratory state, the user plays with a tangible input device allowing the simulated environment to appear. This environment includes images and sounds related to a certain theme. Our preliminary research findings reveal that users felt significantly calmer and marginally significantly better after interacting with the simulated environment. Results from the semi-structured interviews demonstrated that the majority of people appreciated the system and thought it might be effective to support unwinding. These outcomes demonstrate potential in the concept, but testing in a more realistic setting is necessary.

This workshop addresses two strong fields within the Mobile HCI community: games & entertainment and transportation user interfaces. Using transportation technology (e.g., a car, plane, or traveling in public transportation) can be frustrating due to crowded streets, delays, and other travelers. Frustration may lead to aggression and negative experiences of other road members and passengers [4] leading to irrational behaviors [6]. Games & entertainment technology offer potential to resolve these negative user experiences. This workshop brings together entertainment and transportation user interface experts, who are willing to understand mobile entertainment technology as a potential solution to improve the experience of all travelers, drivers, and workers within the transportation field. The overall aim of the workshop is to create a common understanding of the challenges of entertainment in transportation, as well as further extend the research agenda for entertainment in this context from both from a scientific and an industrial perspective.

The complex acoustic environment of car interiors lowers the performance of speech recognition of navigation systems. Interaction designers are challenged with the difficult task of creating clever ways to recover from errors. How do these affect the overall user experience?