Contact tracing apps have been suggested as a promising approach towards containing viral spread during pandemics, yet their actual use in the COVID-19 pandemic has been low. While researchers have examined reasons for or against installing contact tracing apps, we have less understanding of their ongoing use and how they interact with everyday pressures related to work, communities, and mental well-being. Through a survey of 153 working people in Japan and 15 follow-up interviews, we investigated attitudes toward installing and using Japan's national contact tracing app, COCOA, and how these related to respondents’ daily lives, work structures, and general attitudes about the pandemic. We found that motivations about installing the app differed from those related to ongoing usage. Specifically, we identified ways that people navigate uncertain norms of behaviour during the pandemic, and how people consider individual risks such as COVID-related stigmas, anxiety, and financial precarity when deciding if and how to use COCOA. In light of these, we discuss the tension between COCOA's design and desires to protect oneself by selective controlling disclosures. We note that perceived risks are closely tied to respondents' local contexts, and based on our analysis, we identify ways to address these challenges and tensions through design interventions at multiple scales.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479868
The internet facilitates opportunities for adolescents to form relationships and explore their sexuality but seeking intimacy online has also become a stressor. As a result, adolescents often turn to the internet to seek support concerning issues related to sex because of its accessibility, interactivity, and anonymity. We analyzed 3,050 peer comments and 1,451 replies from adolescents (837 posts) who sought advice and/or support about online sexual experiences involving known others. We found peers mostly provided information and emotional support. They gave advice on how to handle negative online sexual experiences and mitigate their long-term repercussions, often based on their own negative experiences. They provided emotional support by letting teens know that they were not alone and should not blame themselves. A key implication of these findings is that these situations seemingly occurred regularly and youth were converging on a subset of norms about how to handle such situations in a way that supported one another. Yet, in some cases, they also resorted to victim-blaming or retaliating against those who broke these norms of "safe" sexting. Teens were grateful for emotional support and advice that helped them engage safely but were defensive when peers were critical of their relationships. Together, our findings suggest that youth are self-organizing to converge on guidelines and norms around safe sexting but have trouble framing their messages so that they are more readily accepted. In our paper, we contribute to the adolescent online safety literature by identifying youth-focused beliefs about safe sexting by analyzing the ways in which online peers give advice and support. We provide actionable recommendations for facilitating the exchange of positive advice and support via online peer-support platforms
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449116
A growing number of people are using catch-up TV services rather than watching simultaneously with other audience members at the time of broadcast. However, computational support for such catching-up users has not been well explored. In particular, we are observing an emerging phenomenon in online media consumption experiences in which speculation plays a vital role. As the phenomenon of speculation implicitly assumes simultaneity in media consumption, there is a gap for catching-up users, who cannot directly appreciate the consumption experiences. This conversely suggests that there is potential for computational support to enhance the consumption experiences of catching-up users. Accordingly, we conducted a series of studies to pave the way for developing computational support for catching-up users. First, we conducted semi-structured interviews to understand how people are engaging with speculation during media consumption. As a result, we discovered the distinctive aspects of speculation-based consumption experiences in contrast to previously-discussed social viewing experiences through sharing immediate reactions. We then designed two prototypes for supporting catching-up users based on our quantitative analysis of Twitter data in regard to reaction- and speculation-based media consumption. Lastly, we evaluated them in a user study and, based on its results, discussed ways to empower catching-up users with the support of computers in response to recent transformations in media consumption.
Creative live streams, where artists or designers demonstrate their creative process, have emerged as a unique and popular genre of live streams due to the real-time interactivity they afford. However, streamer-viewer interactions on most live streaming platforms only enable users to utilize text and emojis to communicate, which limits what viewers can convey and share in real time. To investigate the design space of potential visual and non-textual modalities within creative live streams, we first analyzed existing Twitch extensions and conducted a formative study with streamers who share creative activities to uncover key challenges that these streamers face. We then designed and implemented a prototype system, StreamSketch, which enables viewers and streamers to interact during live streams using multiple modalities, including freeform sketches and text. The prototype was evaluated by two professional artist streamers and their viewers during six streaming sessions. Overall, streamers and viewers found that StreamSketch provided increased engagement and new affordances compared to the traditional text-only modality, and highlighted how efficiency, moderation, and tool integration were continued challenges.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449132
Augmented Reality (AR) applications can enable geographically distant users to collaborate using shared video feeds or interactive 3D holograms, and may be particularly useful in the socially distant context of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, a good user experience is key for their success and could be negatively impacted by network impairments, which are an inevitable occurrence in today’s best-effort Internet. In this paper, we present the findings of an empirical user study, aimed at understanding the effects of network outages, on user experience and behavior, in a collaborative AR task. We highlight how network outages affected users in different ways depending on their role in the collaborative task, and how giving users explicit information about poor network conditions helped them deal with some of these negative effects. Furthermore, we report the strategies that users themselves adopted, to deal with outages, such as batching instructions, or shifting to a different spatial referencing style when communicating with their partners. Lastly, based on our findings, we present some design implications for future remote-collaborative AR application.
The recommender system (RS), as a computer-supported information filtering system, is ubiquitous and influences what we eat, watch, or even like. In online RS, interactions between users and the system form a feedback loop: users take actions based on the recommendations provided by RS, and RS updates its recommendations accordingly. As such interactions increase, the issue of recommendation homogeneity intensifies, which significantly impairs user experience. In the face of this long-standing issue, the newly-emerging social e-commerce offers a new solution -- bringing friends' recommendations into the loop (friend-in-the-loop). In this paper, we conduct an exploratory study on the benefits of friend-in-the-loop through mixed methods on a leading social e-commerce platform in China, Beidian. We reveal that friend-in-the-loop provides users with more accurate and diverse recommendations than merely RS, and significantly alleviates algorithmic homogeneity. Moreover, our qualitative results demonstrate that the introduction of friends' external knowledge, consumers' trust, and empathy accounts for these benefits. Overall, we elaborate that friend-in-the-loop comprehensively benefits both users and RS, and it is a promising HCI-based solution to recommendation homogeneity, which offers insightful implications on designing future human-algorithm collaboration models.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479583
Mobile-based scams are on the rise in emerging markets. However, mobile users' awareness about these scams and the ways to avoid them remains limited. We present an analysis of a qualitative study to examine dynamics of SMS and call based frauds, collectively referred to as mobile-based frauds in the paper, in Pakistan with 96 participants, including different stakeholders in the mobile financial ecosystem: 71 victims of SMS and voice scam, seven non-victims, 15 mobile money agents, and three officials from regulatory agencies that investigate mobile-based phishing attacks. Leveraging the perspectives from different stakeholders, we make four concrete contributions: First, using the four-step social-engineering attack framework, we identify the nuances as well as specific tactics that fraudsters use to scam mobile users. Second, we look beyond the victim and the adversary to study all the actors involved or affected, the roles they played at each step, and the methods and resources used by the adversaries. Third, we discuss victims' understanding of mobile frauds, their behavior post-realization, and their attitudes toward reporting fraud. Finally, we discuss possible points of intervention and offer design recommendations to thwart mobile fraud, including addressing the vulnerabilities in the ecosystem discovered during this study, utilizing existing actors to mitigate the consequences of these attacks, and revisiting the design of fraud reporting mechanisms to be in line with the sociocultural practices.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449115