With easy access to affordable internet-powered smartphones, developing countries are adopting smartphone applications to provide enabling services to its citizens, including eHealth, eGovernance, and digital payments. The challenge is to ensure equitable access to these services by everyone, including people with semi-literacy or low-literacy who form a large part of the population in developing nations. However, extensive HCI literature has identified literacy as one of the barriers to designing user interfaces. In this work, we propose a framework of actionable guidelines for designing smartphone UIs that would be usable by low-literate users. We reviewed the last two decades of HCI literature engaging people with low literacy, to synthesize our framework. To evaluate the framework, we did a preliminary study with a group of 20 practitioners and researchers working in the field of UI/UX/HCI. We also analyzed six publicly available industry reports on designing UIs for people with low-literacy. The proposed guidelines intend to support researchers, practitioners, designers, and implementers in the design and evaluation of UIs of smartphone applications for people with low literacy. We present the evolutionary nature of the proposed framework while highlighting the importance of adopting a translational approach when building such frameworks.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449210
One of the grand challenges of artificial intelligence and affective computing is for technology to become emotionally-aware and thus, more human-like. Modeling human emotions is particularly complicated when we consider the lived experiences of people who are on the autism spectrum. To understand the emotional experiences of autistic adults and their attitudes towards common representations of emotions, we deployed a context study as the first phase of a Grounded Design research project. Based on community observations and interviews, this work contributes empirical evidence of how the emotional experiences of autistic adults are entangled with social interactions as well as the processing of sensory inputs. We learned that (1) the emotional experiences of autistic adults are embodied and co-constructed within the context of physical environments, social relationships, and technology use, and (2) conventional approaches to visually representing emotion in affective education and computing systems fail to accurately represent the experiences and perceptions of autistic adults. We contribute a social-emotional-sensory design map to guide designers in creating more diverse and nuanced affective computing interfaces that are enriched by accounting for neurodivergent users.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449151
Unemployed individuals experience emotional upheaval and financial constraints, and struggle to share their challenges and obtain support from their family members and social circles. While prior work has shown that social media platforms enable its users to safely share their turmoils, hardships, and emotional upheavals and seek support, little is known about how the unemployed use such platforms. Based on a qualitative analysis of data retrieved from unemployment communities on Reddit, our study reveals that redditors on these communities engage in exchanges that range from queries seeking information about job searching to discussions about sensitive topics such as the health and social implications of unemployment. Also, while redditors use mostly negative emotional tonality in their texts when initiating a new post, the comments in response provide considerable social support in form of esteem, emotional, informational, network, and instrumental support. Based on these findings, we share the theoretical implications of our work and offer design recommendation.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449088
Emotional validation describes when one believes that their activities, emotions, beliefs, or other reactions are relevant and meaningful given the circumstance. When people experience distressing, stigmatizing life events, their state of emotional validation and thus their perceived sense of normalcy is often disrupted. Online spaces offer opportunities for coping, managing, and making sense of distress and stigma. In this paper, we focus on pregnancy loss as the context of inquiry and as an important example of a disruptive experience that is also associated with stigma. We examine how online spaces help facilitate or disrupt the process of achieving emotional validation among pregnancy loss survivors. We conducted in-depth interviews with women in the United States who had recently experienced a pregnancy loss. We found that individuals seeking a sense of perceived normalcy after pregnancy loss engage in two forms of validation processes that result in emotional validation – informational and experiential. We identified encounters that disrupt the process of seeking, achieving, and maintaining emotional validation related to: information, designs, algorithms, and interpersonal interactions. We introduce the concept of algorithmic symbolic annihilation to describe the representational and emotional harm participants experienced when they felt they were targets of algorithms assuming that all desired pregnancies proceed as expected. Algorithmic symbolic annihilation refers to how algorithms perpetuate normative and stereotypical narratives about phenomena, where what they account for has power and authority, and what they do not account for does not. To aid in seeking, achieving and sustaining emotional validation among pregnancy loss survivors, we suggest designing for 1) representational belonging to combat symbolic annihilation and 2) information avoidance.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449201
As social media has become more present in people’s day-to-day lives, many turn to these platforms in natural disasters to keep abreast of the ever-evolving crisis situation. Facing the increasing amount of crisis-related information available on the social media platforms, users tend to focus on and reach out to authoritative sources—individuals or organizations that provide authoritative and credible crisis-related information due to their official status or position. As they provide high-quality information, response from the authoritative sources can be especially valuable to social media users directly affected in natural disasters. In this study, we aim to extend the reach of credible information during crisis, and direct the attention of authoritative users to the affected users who need their help. Specifically, we investigate what factors differentiate the tweets by regular users that receive responses from authoritative accounts from those that do not. We find that regular users’ popularity and official accounts’ level of busyness do not seem to affect the likelihood of tweets receiving a response.We thus explore the linguistic features of the tweets’ content. Topic modeling and sentiment analysis results suggest that these linguistic aspects of the tweets may affect the response rate from authoritative sources. Our findings suggest crisis-related policy implications, as well as design implications for social media platforms where such exchanges take place, which can potentially increase the reach of credible information in a crisis and help those affected obtain the safety-critical information they need.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449209
Self-tracking technologies, ranging from digital thermometers to wearable fitness trackers, allow users to use personal data accumulated from their everyday activities. But, to use these data, people have to make sense of how these numbers and figures are relevant to their lives in some way in order to make decisions and gain new insight. This process is impacted by people's emotional reactions to their data. While seeking support from others can be an effective strategy for overcoming these emotional challenges, self-trackers face unique barriers in sharing their personal data. Our study investigates 1) how users seek out support online for emotional barriers elicited by their self-tracking data and 2) what self-described impact this sharing has on their self-tracking practices. To investigate these topics, we analyzed discussions in two online communities on Reddit.com centered around infertility and trying to conceive that consistently describe self-tracking experiences. We found that community members described three distinct driving emotional tensions with their self-tracking data. In seeking community input, users were focused on support for understanding and acting upon their feelings and emotions. Even when data was uncertain, frustrating, or viewed as inaccurate, comparing and learning with others benefited users through feelings of connection, control, and humor this collective sense-making provided. Additionally, we found that users taking breaks from self-tracking in whole or part appeared to support their emotional well-being and long-term motivation to track. Based on these findings, we conclude that self-tracking data has social and emotional value beyond perceived accuracy and individual treatment goals.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449153
Negative attitudes shape experiences with stigmatized conditions such as dementia, from affecting social relationships to influencing willingness to adopt technology. Consequently, attitudinal change has been identified as one lever to improve life for people with stigmatized conditions. Though recognized as a scaleable approach, social media has not been studied in terms of how it should best be designed or deployed to target attitudes and understanding of dementia. Through a mixed methods design with 123 undergraduate college students, we study the effect of being exposed to dementia-related media, including content produced by people with dementia. We selected undergraduate college students as the target of our intervention, as they represent the next generation that will work and interact with individuals with dementia. Our analysis describes changes over the period of two weeks in attitudes and understanding of the condition. The shifts in understanding of dementia that we found in our qualitative analysis were not captured by the instrument we selected to assess understanding of dementia. While small improvements in positive and overall attitudes were seen across all interventions and the control, we observe a different pattern with negative attitudes, where transcriptions of content produced by people with dementia significantly reduced negative attitudes. The discussion presents implications for supporting people with dementia as content producers, doing so in ways that best affect attitudes and understanding by drawing on research on cues and interactive media, and supporting students in changing their perspectives towards people with dementia.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479542
CSCW has previously investigated the “information work” that patients do in relation to their health, illnesses, and treatments. Our study contributes to this ongoing stream of work by investigating the information work that chronically ill patients do in relation to their physical bodily experiences. We use an interpretivist approach and qualitative methods (semi-structured interviews and observations) to examine how patients in a midwestern U.S. city carry out information work related to their bodily experiences of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). Our findings highlight four themes related to such work: bodily experiences of CKD; making meaning of bodily experiences through experiential learning; communicating bodily experiences; and attuning daily life around bodily experiences. In so doing, we show how patients continuously engage in information work in relation to their bodily experiences. For example, we found participants experienced physical sensations such as pain, cramping, and extreme fatigue, which elicited complex labor, yet most patients received little education from health care professionals about what bodily sensations they might have and what these physical experiences might mean. While patients and clinicians worked collaboratively to adjust treatment based on bodily information, such collaborative adjustment often did not occur until patients learned to interpret and communicate bodily experiences through a difficult and physically painful “trial and error” learning process. Our empirical insights extend on the literature of information work that chronically ill patients do and inform design of information technologies and care processes for patients with chronic disease.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3479527