The design of most instant messaging (IM) tools focuses on exchanging content as the meaning and process of communication, a convention that equates content with meaning in a way counter to modern theories of interpersonal communication. We critique these conventions in designing a mobile messaging application, BubbleQ, which de-emphasizes message content and defamiliarizes interaction flows by forbidding users to send content directly. Instead, users send empty "bubbles", blank messages that recipients can fill and return to the sender. Messages are also presented not as per-user threads, but as an aggregation of bubbles across all conversational partners; they are also given a physical form to interact with to further violate common IM design conventions. Interviews with 28 college students who used BubbleQ for two weeks show that these design twists made room for negotiating other meanings, supported playful, mundane interaction, and provided resources for deepening relationships. Further, the aggregate bubbles view led people to reflect holistically on interactions. Together, these findings suggest that IM designers should spend more time addressing the meanings, embodiments, embedding, and cost of messages.

Gaze is a powerful form of social feedback, providing cues about attention and interest, and boredom and distraction. We designed a working prototype that enabled remote participants in a collocated meeting to look around the local meeting space, and that showed local participants where the remote participants' "simulated gazes" (that is, their virtual cameras) were directed. Of course, pointing a camera is not the same as gazing, and so we conducted a study to understand how simulated gazes might be used, and to what extent they would be experienced as social cues. Findings range from the use of simulated gaze to signal attention, to ways in which local and remote participants experienced these simulated gazes. These findings illustrate the value of indirection and abstraction in presenting social cues; raise issues of privacy, visibility, and participation asymmetry; and suggest implications for design and further research.

While motivational affordances are widely used to enhance user engagement in "gamified" apps, they are often employed en masse. Prior research offers little guidance about how individuals with different dispositions may react-positively and negatively-to specific affordances. In this paper, we present a survey study investigating the relationships among individuals' personality traits and perceived preferences for various motivational affordances used in gamification. Our results show that extraverts tend to be motivated by Points, Levels, and Leaderboards; people with high levels of imagination/openness are less likely to be motivated by Avatars. Negative correlations were found between emotional stability (the inverse of neuroticism) and several motivational affordances, indicating a possible limitation of gamification as an approach for a large segment of the population. Our findings contribute to the HCI community, and in particular to designers of persuasive and gamified apps, by providing design suggestions for targeting specific audiences based on personality.

Unlike most social media, where automatic archiving of data is the default, Snapchat defaults to ephemerality: deleting content shortly after it is viewed by a receiver. Interviews with 25 Snapchat users show that ephemerality plays a key role in shaping their practices. Along with friend-adding features that facilitate a network of mostly close relations, default deletion affords everyday, mundane talk and reduces self-consciousness while encouraging playful interaction. Further, although receivers can save content through screenshots, senders are notified; this selective saving with notification supports complex information norms that preserve the feel of ephemeral communication while supporting the capture of meaningful content. This dance of giving and taking, sharing and showing, and agency for both senders and receivers provides the basis for a rich design space of mechanisms, levels, and domains for ephemerality.

Machine translation (MT) creates both opportunities and challenges for multilingual collaboration: While MT enables collaborators to communicate via their native languages, it can introduce errors that make communication difficult. In the current paper, we examine whether displaying two alternative translations for each message will improve conversational grounding and task performance. We conducted a laboratory experiment in which monolingual native English speakers collaborated with bilingual native Mandarin speakers on a map navigation task. Each dyad performed the task in one of three communication conditions: MT with single output, MT with two outputs, and English as a common language. Dyads given two translations for each message communicated more efficiently, and performed better on the task, than dyads given one translation. Our findings show the value of providing multiple translations in multilingual collaboration, and suggest design features of future MT-based collaboration tools.

We propose to improve real-time communication between people who do not share a common language by foregrounding potential problems in machine translation. We developed a prototype chat tool that displays two parallel translations of each chat turn, with the thought that comparing the translations might both highlight problems and provide resources for resolving them. We conducted a user study to investigate how people use and like such an interface compared to a standard one-translation interface. On balance, users preferred two translations to one, using them to both notice differences and infer meaning from uncertain translations, with no increase in workload. This suggests that this interface may help improve cross-lingual communication in practical applications and lays the groundwork for a larger design space around systems that highlight possible errors to support communication.

Traditional communication tools tend to make their presence known, e.g., "when my collaborators and I are using IM to discuss our work, how could we not realize the actual presence of IM?" In the case of machine translation (MT) mediated collaborations, however, the absence or presence of MT is not obvious. English sentences with poor grammar can result from both a partner's lack of fluency and errors in the MT process. We hypothesize that partners' attributions about the source of the errors affects their collaboration experience. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a laboratory experiment in which monolingual native English speaking participants collaborated with bilingual native-Mandarin speakers on a map navigation task. Participants were randomly assigned into a 2 (beliefs about MT: absence vs. presence) by 2 (actual mediation of MT: absence vs. presence) experiment design. Beliefs about presence of MT significantly impacted the collaboration experience, opening new opportunities for both research and design around MT-mediated collaborations.

This work investigates how to bridge the gap between offline and online behaviors at a conference and how the physical resources in the conference (the physical objects used in the conference for gathering attendees together in engaging an activity such as rooms, sessions, and papers) can be used to help facilitate social networking. We build Find and Connect, a system that integrates offline activities and interactions captured in real time with online connections in a conference environment, to provide a list of potential people one should connect to for forming an ephemeral social network. We investigate how social connections can be established and integrated with physical resources through positioning technology, and the relationship between physical proximity encounters and online social connections. Results from our two datasets of two trials, one at the UIC/ATC 2010 conference and GCJK internal marketing event, show that social connections that are reciprocal in relationship, such as friendship and exchanged contacts, have tighter, denser, and highly clustered networks compared to unidirectional relationships such as follow. We discover that there is a positive relationship between physical proximity encounters and online social connections before the social connection is made for friends, but a negative relationship for after the social connection is made. The first indicates social selection is strong, and the second indicates social influence is weak. Even though our dataset is sparse, nonetheless we believe our work is promising and novel which is worthy of future research.

With the rising popularity of social networks, people's locations are being used for providing rich mobile social services. We present a mobile social service in our office environment called Find & Connect. We use WiFi to record a user's position and allow users to efficiently find, reserve and manage office resources, like meeting rooms and desks, and easily connect to other colleagues through scheduled interactions like having a meeting and/or unscheduled yet implicit interactions like ephemeral encounters. We then describe how we manage office resources and connect with people, followed by a user study that we conducted in our office.