This study explores privacy concerns perceived by people with respect to having their DNA tested by direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com. Data collected from 510 respondents indicate that those who have already obtained a DTC genetic test have significantly lower levels of privacy and security concerns than those who have not obtained a DTC genetic test. Qualitative data from respondents of both these groups show that the concerns are mostly similar. However, the factors perceived to alleviate privacy concerns are more varied and nuanced amongst those who have obtained a DTC genetic test. Our data suggest that privacy concerns or lack of concerns are based on complex and multiple considerations including data ownership, access control of data and regulatory authorities of social, political and legal systems. Respondents do not engage in a full cost/benefit analysis of having their DNA tested.

This study explores how people perceive the potential utility of trustworthiness indicators and how willing they are to consider contributing to them as a way to combat the problem of misinformation and disinformation on social media. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from the survey (N=376) indicates that a majority of respondents believe trustworthiness indicators would be valuable as they can reduce uncertainty and provide guidance on how to interact with content. However, perceptions of how and when these indicators can provide value vary widely in detail. A majority of respondents are also willing to contribute to trustworthiness indicators on social media to some extent due to their sense of duty and personal expertise in information verification practices but are very wary of the effort or burden it would place on them. Respondents who did not want to use or contribute to trustworthiness indicators attributed it to their lack of faith in the concept of trustworthiness indicators stemming from perceived inherent and unsurmountable biases on social media. Together our findings highlight the complexity of designing, structuring and presenting trustworthiness indicators keeping in mind the diverse set of user attitudes and perceptions.

In HCI research, non-use of systems, especially involuntary loss of use, is a relatively neglected topic. How do people perceive the impacts on their lives should the Internet go out for an extended period of time? Would it be a minor inconvenience or Armageddon? We took a Futures Studies approach to conduct a conceptualized future, scenario-based study with 754 responses to a survey of mostly students at three universities and used framing theory to help explicate the findings from qualitative data analysis. Our data show that most respondents do believe a long-term complete Internet outage is possible; however, perceptions in terms of what the impacts would be range widely. Most participants employ an egocentric frame to understand the impacts in terms of changes in their personal relationships and activities, with both gains and losses envisioned. A minority frame their visions in terms of the societal level, with severe infrastructure problems resulting. This paper is the first to explore perceptions of the potential impacts of an Internet outage and provide implications for preparedness and design.

This paper presents a study of a messaging interface prototype for online dating intended to improve women's face-to-face meeting decisions, and therefore the capacity to manage the gendered risks involved with such meetings. The interface prompts users with discussion topics that are potentially more valuable for user evaluation than the impression management-motivated topics often chosen by men. These topics come in the form of first-date scenarios that messaging partners either agree or disagree on. Through a mixed-methods study utilizing speed dating events, daters used the interface to interact before meeting face-to-face. Results indicate that women's face-to-face meeting decisions improve when the interface prompts them to discuss scenarios involving agreement of opinion. Men's decisions are worsened by the same interface variant, potentially due to the displayed agreement being misinterpreted as a signal of compatibility. The study ultimately stresses that designs intended for women, and at-risk groups more broadly, must also be assessed with other user demographics-namely those that pose a risk-to identify unforeseen implications.

This paper explores the ways in which users give up as well as revert back to using social media based on the analysis of qualitative data from 680 respondents to a survey (N=1072). By focusing on the motivations rather than any particular social media platform, we were able to uncover reasons for voluntary non-use and reversion when users have a choice of several social media platforms. Our findings provide an ecological view of social media non-use and reversion highlighting that 1) previous findings of social media non-use and reversion reported on a single social media platform (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) are seen across several other platforms too; 2) access to multiple social media platforms in itself readily leads to non-use of one platform in favor of the use of another for reasons such as lack of differentiation and/or richness of features, device constraints of storage/ memory space or operating system support, perceptions of fading popularity, and availability of "a new kid on the block;" 3) findings of non-use and reversion practices and motivations that were seemingly incongruent between previous studies of different or same social media platforms tend to coalesce when we take a wider look at the social media landscape. By adopting the theoretical lens of cognitive biases in decision-making we were able to explain why users quit but decide to revert to using again in the environment of various positive and negative experiences on a particular platform, and to reconcile the seemingly paradoxical reasons for social media non-use and reversion.

“Reply” and “Reply All” buttons in email provide the convenience of a quick reply to those included in the email. Yet this very convenience can be troublesome to both the individual and the group involved if receivers intentionally or unintentionally hit one button instead of the other. In this paper we explore how replying decisions are made and what contributes to erroneous use of Reply All through an experimental study (N=109) and a survey study (N=112). Data from the experiment suggest that errors are not influenced by how the reply button suite is arranged but rather by the explicitness of the desired response action and how multiple recipients are displayed. Qualitative data from the survey suggest that while people are cognizant of Reply All misuse, lack of universally agreed upon criteria for appropriate Reply/Reply All choice leads to errors. We discuss the implications of these insights for email interface design.

Despite the popularity of online dating systems, prior work indicates that online daters struggle to present and evaluate traits germane to attraction. However, the research community is largely unaware of successful online dating system-use strategies and how the knowledge of these strategies could inform system design. In this paper we begin to address this gap in knowledge with an interview study of online dating coaches who consider their advocated system-use strategies successful based on personal use and feedback from clients who implemented their strategies. Their advocated strategies entail keeping online evaluation intentionally minimal and persuading users to meet in-person as quickly as possible because current system designs stifle reliable evaluation of attraction-relevant traits online, notably personality. We discuss the implications of insights gathered from these strategies for online dating system design using theories relevant to romantic attraction.

Online dating systems are the most common way people meet their marriage partners online. Nevertheless, online daters struggle to evaluate personality traits of potential partners using profile pages and private messaging in these systems. Meanwhile, Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs) have emerged as a popular way young people find romantic partners for relationships in the physical world. We conducted two interview studies -- one concerning evaluation behavior in online dating systems (n=41) and the other concerning collaborative activities in MOGs (n=35). Insights from these studies reveal the weaknesses in evaluation tools native to online dating and suggest that collaborative activities could potentially address evaluation challenges in online dating. The paper concludes with a discussion of a series of design concepts for online dating in order to improve users' abilities to evaluate their potential romantic partners for in-person meetings.

This paper explores how the adoption of mobile and social computing technologies has impacted upon the way in which we coordinate social group-activities. We present a diary study of 36 individuals that provides an overview of how group coordination is currently performed as well as the challenges people face. Our findings highlight that people primarily use open-channel communication tools (e.g., text messaging, phone calls, email) to coordinate because the alternatives are seen as either disrupting or curbing to the natural conversational processes. Yet the use of open-channel tools often results in conversational overload and a significant disparity of work between coordinating individuals. This in turn often leads to a sense of frustration and confusion about coordination details. We discuss how the findings argue for a significant shift in our thinking about the design of coordination support systems.

Despite the importance of individuals coming together for social group-activities (e.g. pick-up volleyball, chess clubs), the process by which such groups coalesce is poorly understood. Existing theories focus on adoption and contribution rates, group types, and the formation of group norms, as opposed to the processes involved in initial group coalescence. We address this gap in the literature through an interview study examining: 1) how well people's needs for social group activity engagement are being met; 2) the challenges they face in finding and participating in, and; 3) leading interest-based group activities. Our findings highlight how people-s needs are not being addressed by current technologies. In particular, they place a heavy burden on individuals to step forward into leadership positions where the return they will receive for their efforts is often unknown, or extremely limited. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of interest-based group coalescing technology.

Online dating systems are now widely used to search for romance and yet there is little research on how people use these systems to manage their impressions with potential romantic partners. To address this issue we conducted an interview study of 41 online dating users, revealing that-contrary to prior work-online daters largely do not want to intentionally deceive their online dating partners because they think such lies would quickly be discovered face-to-face. Nevertheless, bad first dates were a norm rather than an exception for this study's participants. In this paper we present various frustrations online daters associate with conveying and forming impressions of potential romantic partners before meeting face-to-face. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of online dating systems.

This paper explores how na?ve observers recognize and interpret transitive actions (actions involving manipulation of objects) without accompanying speech, in order to derive guidelines for the design of gesture interpretation systems. Semi-structured interviews with 11 observers, interpreting 106 video clips of transitive actions elicited unstaged from 16 participants, reveal that people are generally able to interpret the transitive action as well as characteristics of the object manipulated despite individual variations in how people naturally gesture. In particular, people focus primarily on hand movement and hand shape to correctly interpret object characteristics, and on manner of movement of arms and/or final location of hands to interpret the goal of the transitive action (e.g., arrange objects vs. clear objects). These findings provide insights on aspects of gestures one can focus on to inform and guide the design of gesture interpretation models for interfaces that allow for individual variations in natural gesture production.

This paper explores how interaction with systems using touchless gestures can be made intuitive and natural. Analysis of 912 video clips of gesture production from a user study of 16 subjects communicating transitive actions (manipulation of objects with or without external tools) indicated that 1) dynamic pantomimic gestures where imagined tool/object is explicitly held are performed more intuitively and easily than gestures where a body part is used to represent the tool/object or compared to static hand poses and 2) gesturing while communicating the transitive action as how the user habitually performs the action (pantomimic action) is perceived to be easier and more natural than gesturing while communicating it as an instruction. These findings provide guidelines for the characteristics of gestures and user mental models one must consciously be concerned with when designing and implementing gesture vocabularies of touchless interaction.

Current cell phone designs are limited by the information a caller can provide to the receiver at the time of a call. As a result callers are handicapped in effectively negotiating interaction commitment from the receiver, and perhaps more importantly, receivers are unable to make informed call handling decisions. To examine the nature of this information gap we 1) developed Telling Calls, a mobile phone application which allows users to provide and receive information such as what the call is about and the circumstances of the caller under which it is being made, and 2) conducted a qualitative field study (36 users) and a quantitative field study (30 users) of Telling Calls use. Together these studies provide insights on how additional caller generated information shared at the time of call handling effectively improves the process of negotiating interaction commitment, and establishing common ground.

Call handling decisions are made based on explicit information such as caller ID and/or implicit knowledge inferred from previous interactions. Our previous work showed that people often answer calls to find out the reason behind the call. This suggests that the provision of explicit information regarding what a call is about or under what circumstances is it being made can be of value in call handling decisions. To explore this concept we developed Telling Calls a prototype application for cell phone users to provide and receive call related information. We present the design rationale and lessons learned from qualitative accounts of users' experience with the application in their daily life. Our findings confirm the utility of our design and suggest ways in which we can improve the design to support informed call handling decisions in mobile phones.

We present a conceptual framework for location-aware community systems and results from two studies of how socially-defined places influence people's information sharing and communication needs.