Socioemotional competencies are fundamental for children’s growth and success, and prior work shows that in some instances, technology can support children in acquiring these skills. Here, we examine whether children can learn to use a socioemotional strategy known as “self-talk” from a conversational agent (CA). To investigate this question, we designed and built “Self-Talk with Superhero Zip,” an interactive CA experience, and deployed it for one week in ten family homes to pairs of siblings between the ages of five and ten (N = 20). We found that children could recall and accurately describe the lessons taught by the intervention, and we saw indications of children applying self-talk in daily life. Targeting sibling pairs rather than individual users proved to be a design challenge in its own right, and families suggested design ideas for supporting this context, such as UI to manage conversational flow and reduce competition, and visuals and embodied activities to encourage focus. The dual-user context coupled with the audio modality prompted “preinput huddles” in which children conversed in whispers before responding to the system. We contribute evidence that CAs can support children in learning to use self-talk as well as design guidance for creating multi-user conversational interfaces.

Deceptive design patterns (known as dark patterns) are interface characteristics which modify users’ choice architecture to gain users’ attention, data, and money. Deceptive design patterns have yet to be documented in safety technologies despite evidence that designers of safety technologies make decisions that can powerfully influence user behavior. To address this gap, we conduct a case study of the Citizen app, a commercially available technology which notifies users about local safety incidents. We bound our study to Atlanta and triangulate interview data with an analysis of the user interface. Our results indicate that Citizen heightens users’ anxiety about safety while encouraging the use of profit-generating features which offer security. These findings contribute to an emerging conversation about how deceptive design patterns interact with sociocultural factors to produce deceptive infrastructure. We propose the need to expand an existing taxonomy of harm to include emotional load and social injustice and offer recommendations for designers interested in dismantling the deceptive infrastructure of safety technologies.