We examine WhatsApp-based reselling practices adopted by small garment sellers in Surat, a textile city in India, as a response to the challenges posed by high commission costs, confusing dashboards, and restrictive rules of global e-commerce platforms. Through interviews and observations, we show how sellers use WhatsApp’s popularity to collaborate with women resellers and customers, enabling participation in online commerce bypassing e-commerce platforms. Using the lens of translation, we argue that WhatsApp functions as a tool and site of praxis for sellers who translate the complicated, standardized, and expensive processes of e-commerce platforms that are in English into multimodal, idiomatic, collaborative reselling practices. These are undertaken in regional languages on WhatsApp with the help of traders and women resellers economically benefiting everyone while delivering a personalized online shopping experience for customers. We discuss the politics of this translation, examining its impact on the design of e-commerce platforms while also shaping the discourse of reselling as an empowering pathway for women.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713178
Financial technologies have reshaped how many individuals manage daily financial activities, introducing new ways to interact with traditional financial products. Given the swift adoption of these technologies, shared language and conceptual frameworks are needed to better represent emerging methods of financial collaboration, hopefully leading to informed design and research. We provide the first in-depth analysis of 31 consumer-facing financial applications that provide support for budgeting, payments, and long-term planning to identify how sharing is mechanized at the system level. Our analysis offers sharing dimensions and patterns that depict the diversity of how existing applications support, or actively hinder, participation in financial sharing. Reflecting on our analysis, we highlight the need for more granular information for consumers and advocates to promote healthy financial sharing practices.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713119
This study examines how WhatsApp has evolved from a personal communication tool to a professional platform, focusing on its use by small business owners in India. Initially embraced in smaller, rural communities for its ease of use and familiarity, WhatsApp played a crucial role in local economies. However, as Meta introduced WhatsApp Business with new, formalized features, users encountered challenges in adapting to the more complex and costly platform. Interviews with 14 small business owners revealed that while they adapted creatively, they felt marginalized by the advanced tools. This research contributes to HCI literature by exploring the transition from personal to professional use and introduces the concept of Coercive Professionalization. It highlights how standardization by large tech companies affects marginalized users, exacerbating power imbalances and reinforcing digital colonialism, concluding with design implications for supporting community-based appropriations.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713988
This study explores how Pakistani mothers, as primary caregivers, navigate the use and non-use of screen media-based devices (SMDs) in their parenting practices. Grounded in the uses and gratifications theory, we explore how mothers seek specific gratifications through their children's use of SMDs, and how unmet needs prompt them to adopt strategies for limiting SMD use. Through an analysis of interview and survey data, we present and discuss different patterns of SMD use among mothers, emphasizing their needs for religious education, cultural enrichment, family bonding, and early learning. These findings reveal a trend toward value-driven SMD use. We further compare these strategies with global digital parenting practices and identify opportunities for designing culturally relevant technological solutions to support digital parenting in this space.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3715270
Smartphone users often regret aspects of their phone use, especially social media use. However, pinpointing specific ways in which the design of an interface contributes to regrettable use can be challenging due to the complexity of social media app features and user intentions. We conducted a one-week study with 17 Android users, using a novel method where we passively collected screenshots every five seconds, which we analyzed via a multimodal large language model to understand participants’ usage activity at a fine-grained level. Triangulating this data with data from experience sampling, surveys, and interviews, we found that regret varies based on user intention, with non-intentional and social media use being especially regrettable. Regret also varies by social media activity; participants were most likely to regret viewing algorithmically recommended content and comments. Additionally, participants frequently deviated to browsing social media when their intention was direct communication, which slightly increased their regret. Our findings provide guidance to designers and policy-makers seeking to improve users’ experience and autonomy.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713724
Conspiratorial thinking can connect many distinct or distant ills to a central cause. This belief has visual form in the octopus map: a map where a central force (for instance a nation, an ideology, or an ethnicity) is depicted as a literal or figurative octopus, with extending tendrils. In this paper, we explore how octopus maps function as visual arguments through an analysis of historical examples as well as a through a crowd-sourced study on how the underlying data and the use of visual metaphors contribute to specific negative or conspiratorial interpretations. We find that many features of the data or visual style can lead to "octopus-like" thinking in visualizations, even without the use of an explicit octopus motif. We conclude with a call for a deeper analysis of visual rhetoric, and an acknowledgment of the potential for the design of data visualizations to contribute to harmful or conspiratorial thinking.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713583