Today’s youth face many mental health challenges and are increasingly represented in psychiatric hospitalizations. Scholars have sought to understand social media’s role in mental health issues, but limited work has explored TikTok—the video-centric social media platform that is popular with youth—and people’s connections around psychiatric hospitalization experiences. In this study, we used qualitative content analysis to examine a random sample of 140 TikTok posts related to psychiatric hospitalization. We found that members of this population frequently utilize humor to create and maintain a positive and supportive community with each other. We also describe how TikTok’s design affords these interactions among community members, and conclude with a series of provocations for researchers and designers working at the intersections of social media and mental illness. We hope our study provides insights for how to further support rather than just censor youth in using creative outlets to connect with each other.

Many people have experienced mindlessly scrolling on social media. We investigated these experiences through the lens of normative dissociation: total cognitive absorption, characterized by diminished self-awareness and reduced sense of agency. To explore user experiences of normative dissociation and how design affects the likelihood of normative dissociation, we deployed Chirp, a custom Twitter client, to 43 U.S. participants. Experience sampling and interviews revealed that sometimes, becoming absorbed in normative dissociation on social media felt like a beneficial break. However, people also reported passively slipping into normative dissociation, such that they failed to absorb any content and were left feeling like they had wasted their time. We found that designed interventions–including custom lists, reading history labels, time limit dialogs, and usage statistics–reduced normative dissociation. Our findings demonstrate that interaction designs intended to capture attention likely do so by harnessing people’s natural inclination to seek normative dissociation experiences. This suggests that normative dissociation may be a more productive framing than addiction for discussing social media overuse.

Two-dimensional canvases are the core components of many digital productivity and creativity tools, with “artboards” containing objects rather than pixels. Unfortunately, the contents of artboards remain largely inaccessible to blind users relying on screen-readers, but the precise problems are not well understood. This study sought to understand how blind screen-reader users interact with artboards. Specifically, we conducted contextual interviews, observations, and task-based usability studies with 15 blind participants to understand their experiences of artboards found in Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, and Google Slides. Participants expressed that the inaccessibility of these artboards contributes to significant educational and professional barriers. We found that the key problems faced were: (1) high cognitive loads from a lack of feedback about artboard contents and object state; (2) difficulty determining relationships among artboard objects; and (3) constant uncertainty about whether object manipulations were successful. We offer design remedies that improve feedback for object state, relationships, and manipulations.

Programmers often consult an online Q&A forum such as Stack Overflow to learn new APIs. This paper presents an empirical study on the prevalence and severity of API misuse on Stack Overflow. To reduce manual assessment effort, we design ExampleCheck, an API usage mining framework that extracts patterns from over 380K Java repositories on GitHub and subsequently reports potential API usage violations in Stack Overflow posts. We analyze 217,818 Stack Overflow posts using ExampleCheck and find that 31% may have potential API usage violations that could produce unexpected behavior such as program crashes and resource leaks. Such API misuse is caused by three main reasons---missing control constructs, missing or incorrect order of API calls, and incorrect guard conditions. Even the posts that are accepted as correct answers or upvoted by other programmers are not necessarily more reliable than other posts in terms of API misuse. This study result calls for a new approach to augment Stack Overflow with alternative API usage details that are not typically shown in curated examples.

Programmers often consult Q&A websites such as Stack Overflow (SO) to learn new APIs. However, online code snippets are not always complete or reliable in terms of API usage. To assess online code snippets, we build a Chrome extension, ExampleCheck that detects API usage violations in SO posts using API usage patterns mined from 380K GitHub projects. It quantifies how many GitHub examples follow common API usage and illustrates how to remedy the detected violation in a given SO snippet. With ExampleCheck, programmers can easily identify the pitfalls of a given SO snippet and learn how much it deviates from common API usage patterns in GitHub. The demo video is at https://youtu.be/WOnN-wQZsH0.