Local search entails looking for places, such as restaurants or hotels, in a geographically-constrained region. Within local search, it has been observed that an individual's familiarity with their environment (i.e. how well they know the area in a query of the form "{places} in {area}") impacts which places they are most interested in visiting. Less well-understood though is how people's information preferences differ during 1) different phases of the search process and 2) based on their level of familiarity. Through a series of surveys in the domain of dining, we explore how familiarity moderates what level of information is useful to an individual about restaurant location when choosing a place to visit. We further examine how these preferences vary between regions and phases of local search (deciding on a restaurant or determining how to go). We contribute an understanding of people's information preferences during search, building on prior research of how offline context impacts online needs.

People often share emotions with others in order to manage their emotional experiences. We investigate how social media properties such as visibility and directedness affect how people share emotions in Facebook, and their satisfaction after doing so. 141 participants rated 1,628 of their own recent status updates, posts they made on others' timelines, and private messages they sent for intensity, valence, personal relevance, and overall satisfaction felt after sharing each message. For network-visible channels-status updates and posts on others' timelines-they also rated their satisfaction with replies they received. People shared differently between channels, with more intense and negative emotions in private messages. People felt more satisfied after sharing more positive emotions in all channels and after sharing more personally relevant emotions in network-visible channels. Finally, people's overall satisfaction after sharing emotions in network-visible channels is strongly tied to their reply satisfaction. Quality of replies, not just quantity, matters, suggesting the need for designs that help people receive valuable responses to their shared emotions.

Designers have demonstrated an increased interest in designing for reflection. However, that work currently occurs under a variety of diverse auspices. To help organize and investigate this literature, this paper present a review of research on systems designed to support reflection. Key findings include that most work in this area does not actually define the concept of reflection. We also find that most evaluations do not focus on reflection per se rather but on some other outcome arguably linked to reflection. Our review also describes the relationship between reflection and persuasion evidenced implicitly by both rhetorical motivations for and implementation details of system design. After discussing the significance of our findings, we conclude with a series of recommendations for improving research on and design for reflection.

Despite the abundance of research on social networking sites, relatively little research has studied those who choose not to use such sites. This paper presents results from a questionnaire of over 400 Internet users, focusing specifically on Facebook and those users who have left the service. Results show the lack of a clear, binary distinction between use and non-use, that various practices enable diverse ways and degrees of engagement with and disengagement from Facebook. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals numerous complex and interrelated motivations and justifications, both for leaving and for maintaining some type of connection. These motivations include: privacy, data misuse, productivity, banality, addiction, and external pressures. These results not only contribute to our understanding of online sociality by examining this under-explored area, but they also build on previous work to help advance how we conceptually account for the sociological processes of non-use.

Romantic partners face issues of relational development including managing information privacy, tension between individual and relational needs, and accountability to existing friends. Prior work suggests that affordances of social media might highlight and shape these tensions; to explore this, we asked 20 people to reflect daily for two weeks on feelings and decisions around their own and others' Facebook use related to their relationships. Most generally, we find that tensions arise when romantic partners must manage multiple relationships simultaneously because Facebook audiences are so present and so varied. People also engage in subtle negotiation around and appropriation of Facebook's features to accomplish both personal and relational goals. By capturing both why people make these decisions and how Facebook's affordances support them, we expect our findings to generalize to many other social media tools and to inform theorizing about how these tools affect relational development.

Inspired by conversational visualization tools and the increasing enactment of relationships in social media, we examine how people reflect on friendships and how social data and conversation may affect this. We asked 28 people to reflect on their relationship with a close friend either alone, alone but with access to Facebook's "See Friendship" page, or with the friend using their See Friendship page. Observation and interviews revealed a rich array of practices around why, when, and how people reflect on friendships; that both friends and data make reflection more positive, more focused, and more fun; that those are not necessarily good things; and that third parties are a common theme. These findings suggest a number of design considerations, including supporting different types of reflection, aligning the interface with important moments and content useful for reflection, and carefully considering the fidelity of the visualization and data presented.

Reminiscing is a valuable activity throughout the lifespan, helping people establish and maintain their identities and their relationships. Much of this happens in an everyday way, with reminiscing arising naturally out of one's experiences, thoughts, and conversations. In this article we describe work around Pensieve, a tool to support everyday, spontaneous, individual reminiscing through memory triggers—e-mailed reminders that contain snippets from content one has previously created in social media or generic questions that encourage people to reflect on their past. Through a combination of interviews, questionnaires, design activities, and a long-term deployment of Pensieve, we demonstrate the potential value of social media content such as Facebook wall posts and status updates for supporting reminiscence, the utility of systems that support spontaneous reminiscing and writing about the past, the importance of reminders to both reminiscing and lifelogging systems, and insights into people's current pr...

This is a critical design paper offering a possible scenario of use intended to provoke reflection about values and politics of design in persuasive computing. We describe the design of a system - Fit4Life - that encourages individuals to address the larger goal of reducing obesity in society by promoting individual healthy behaviors. Using the Persuasive Systems Design Model [26], this paper outlines the Fit4Life persuasion context, the technology, its use of persuasive messages, and an experimental design to test the system's efficacy. We also contribute a novel discussion of the ethical and sociocultural considerations involved in our design, an issue that has remained largely unaddressed in the existing persuasive technologies literature [29].

This paper argues for evaluating the impact of persuasive systems on users beyond metrics that focus on system usage, based on an interview study of 16 Wii Fit users. While exploring their experiences and reasons for abandoning the system, two main themes emerged: the tension between Wii Fit as a fitness tool and a game, and ways participants reacted to the system's feedback about their weight and performance. Some participants used Wii Fit as a "gateway fitness" tool, moving beyond it to other fitness routines. Additionally, some users had significant emotional reactions to the Wii Fitts feedback. We argue that these 'side effects' are crucial considerations for the design and long-term evaluation of persuasive technologies.

Group cohesiveness is a vital social dynamic that is difficult to achieve in virtual teams, but leadership can help groups move past these challenges. We used the Language Style Matching metric to measure group cohesiveness over the course of interaction while groups with either assigned or emerging leaders worked via online chat to complete a collaborative task. We find that overall, successful groups are more cohesive than unsuccessful groups at all times. For groups with assigned leaders, we find this same pattern of cohesiveness. For groups with emerging leaders we find that successful groups and unsuccessful groups are similar in group cohesiveness during the first two-thirds of interaction, but during the final third successful groups are more cohesive than unsuccessful groups.

Reminiscing is a valuable activity that people of all ages spontaneously and informally partake in as part of their everyday lives. This paper discusses the design and use of Pensieve, a system that supports everyday reminiscence by emailing memory triggers to people that contain either social media content they previously created on third-party websites or text prompts about common life experiences. We discuss how the literature on reminiscence informed Pensieve's design, then analyze data from 91 users over five months. We find that people value spontaneous reminders to reminisce as well as the ability to write about their reminiscing. Shorter, more general triggers draw more responses, as do triggers containing people's own photos-although responses to photos tended to contain more metadata elements than storytelling elements. We compare these results to data from a second, Pensieve-like system developed for Facebook, and suggest a number of important aspects to consider for both designers and researchers around technology and reminiscence.