Related papers: The Engagement-Prolonging Designs Teens Encounter …
Adolescents heavily rely on social media to build and maintain close relationships, yet current platform designs often make self-disclosure feel risky or uncomfortable. Through a three-part study involving 19 teens aged 13-18, we identify…
Social annotation platforms enable student engagement by integrating discussions directly into course materials. However, in large online courses, the sheer volume of comments can overwhelm students and impede learning. This paper…
Today's largest technology corporations, especially ones with consumer-facing products such as social media platforms, use a variety of unethical and often outright illegal tactics to maintain their dominance. One tactic that has risen to…
Youth increasingly turn to large language models (LLMs) for mental well-being support, yet current personalization in LLMs can overlook the heterogeneous lived experiences shaping their needs. We conducted a participatory study with youth,…
Social VR has experienced tremendous growth in the commercial space recently as an emerging technology for rich interactions themed around leisure, work, and relationship building. As a result, the state of social VR application design has…
Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used as a platform for social interaction, including as a means for older adults to maintain engagement. However, there has been limited research to examine the features of social VR that are most…
We present a design framework for friendship-supportive youth social media, derived from a synthesis of five empirical studies with 331 youth participants (ages 13-25) using interviews, co-design, surveys, diary studies, and a field…
Recent work has shown that front-end code generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) can embed deceptive designs. To assess the magnitude of this problem, identify the factors that influence deceptive design production, and test strategies…
Persuasive designs become prevalent on smartphones, and an increasing number of users report having problematic smartphone use behaviours. Persuasive designs in smartphones might be accountable for the development and reinforcement of such…
Mobile gaming apps are woven into children's daily lives. Given their ongoing cognitive and emotional development, children are especially vulnerable and depend on designs that safeguard their well-being. When apps feature manipulative…
Online services pervasively employ manipulative designs (i.e., dark patterns) to influence users to purchase goods and subscriptions, spend more time on-site, or mindlessly accept the harvesting of their personal data. To protect users from…
Social media platforms have rapidly adopted algorithmic curation with little consideration for the potential harm to users' mental well-being. We present findings from design workshops with 21 participants diagnosed with mental illness…
Tumblr, as a leading content provider and social media, attracts 371 million monthly visits, 280 million blogs and 53.3 million daily posts. The popularity of Tumblr provides great opportunities for advertisers to promote their products…
Social media is central to how young people maintain relationships, develop identity, and access communities, yet dominant platform designs often leave youth feeling disempowered rather than supported. My dissertation argues that youth…
Online platforms have a wealth of data, run countless experiments and use industrial-scale algorithms to optimize user experience. Despite this, many users seem to regret the time they spend on these platforms. One possible explanation is…
Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We present automated techniques that enable experts to…
Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is widely used to study adolescents' experiences; yet, how the design of EMA platforms shapes engagement, research practices, and power dynamics in youth studies remains under-examined. We developed a…
Although socializing is a powerful driver of youth engagement online, platforms struggle to leverage engagement to promote learning. We seek to understand this dynamic using a multi-stage analysis of over 14,000 comments on Scratch, an…
Engagement in educational games, a recently popular academic topic, has been shown to increase learning performance, as well as a number of attitudinal factors, such as intrinsic interest and motivation. However, there is a lack of research…
We present design guidelines for incorporating fidgeting into the virtual world as a tool for students in online lectures. Fidgeting is associated with increased attention and self-regulation, and has the potential to help students focus.…