Yubo Kou

Managing Uncertainty: Using Social Media for Risk Assessment during a Public Health Crisis

Recently, diseases like H1N1 influenza, Ebola, and Zika virus have created severe crises, requiring public resources and personal behavior adaptation. Crisis Informatics literature examines interconnections of people, organizations, and IT during crisis events. However, how people use technology to cope with disease crises (outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics) remains understudied. We investigate how individuals used social media in response to the outbreak of Zika, focusing on travel-related decisions. We found that extreme uncertainty and ambiguity characterized the Zika virus crisis. To cope, people turned to social media for information gathering and social learning geared towards personal risk assessment and modifying decisions when dealing with partial and conflicting information about Zika. In particular, individuals sought local information and used socially informed logical reasoning to deduce the risk at a specific locale. We conclude with implications for designing information systems to support individual risk assessment and decision-making when faced with uncertainty and ambiguity during public health crises.

Offshoring Digital Work, but Not Physical Output: Differential Access to Task Objects and Coordination in Globally Distributed Automotive Engineering and Graphic Design Work

When scholars and practitioners consider the implications of off shoring work, their primary concern is often the impact off shoring has on communication between people at different sites. When time zones and geographic boundaries separate employees, communication is limited, making it difficult for remote colleagues to form trusting and familiar relationships with one another. However, off shoring not only obstructs person-to-person interactions, it also impedes person-to-object interactions. This is potentially problematic as many organizations today still produce physical products, such as printed marketing collaterals, computers, home decor, or automobiles. Though organizations that create physical outputs may engage in digital work processes, people at these organizations may still rely on interactions with the physical objects that they produce in order to complete tasks. In this paper we investigate impeded person-to-object interactions at two offshore work sites representing two different occupations: automotive engineering and graphic design.

The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design

Interest in critical scholarship that engages with the complexity of user experience (UX) practice is rapidly expanding, yet the vocabulary for describing and assessing criticality in practice is currently lacking. In this paper, we outline and explore the limits of a specific ethical phenomenon known as dark patterns, where user value is supplanted in favor of shareholder value. We assembled a corpus of examples of practitioner-identified dark patterns and performed a content analysis to determine the ethical concerns contained in these examples. This analysis revealed a wide range of ethical issues raised by practitioners that were frequently conflated under the umbrella term of dark patterns, while also underscoring a shared concern that UX designers could easily become complicit in manipulative or unreasonably persuasive practices. We conclude with implications for the education and practice of UX designers, and a proposal for broadening research on the ethics of user experience.

UX Practitioners' Engagement with Intermediate-Level Knowledge

Scholars have repeatedly called for the knowledge production efforts of the HCI research community to have resonance with the needs of practitioners. These efforts, reified in approaches such as implications for design, annotated portfolios, and other forms of intermediate-level knowledge have begun to take hold within the research community, yet it is unclear if and how these forms of knowledge are used to actually support user experience (UX) practice. In this study, we analyzed resources shared via URLs that pointed to articles on external websites within a practitioner-focused Reddit community. Using Löwgrens taxonomy of intermediate-level knowledge, we identified the forms of knowledge these resources represent, and use this analysis as a provocation for future exploration into the types of knowledge practitioners desire and use to support their practice.

Investigating Support Seeking from Peers for Pregnancy in Online Health Communities

We report a study of peer support in online health communities for pregnancy care along three gestational stages (trimesters) to investigate how pregnant women seek and receive peer support during different stages of pregnancy. Using Babycenter.com as our research setting, we found that pregnant women sought peer support due to constrained access to healthcare providers, dissatisfaction with healthcare services/medical advice, limited offline social support, and unavailability of information in other venues. While the particular topics of concern typifying each trimester were distinct, pregnant women consistently sought advice, informal and formal knowledge, reassurance, and emotional support from peers during each stage of pregnancy. BabyCenter.com peers provided support by leveraging their own experiential knowledge and passing along clinical expertise acquired during the course of their own healthcare. We discuss design implications for health services and IT systems that meet pregnant womens temporal and multi-faceted needs during prenatal care.

Supporting Distributed Critique through Interpretation and Sense-Making in an Online Creative Community

Critique is an important component of creative work in design education and practice, through which individuals can solicit advice and obtain feedback on their work. Face-to-face critique in offline settings such as design studios has been well-documented and theorized. However, little is known about unstructured distributed critique in online creative communities where people share and critique each others work, and how these practices might resemble or differ from studio critique. In this paper, we use mixed-methods to examine distributed critique practices in a UX-focused online creative community on Reddit. We found that distributed critique resembles studio critique categorically, but differs qualitatively. While studio critique often focuses on depth, distributed critique often revolved around collective sensemaking, through which creative workers engaged in iteratively interpreting, defining, and refining the artifact and their process. We discuss the relationship between distributed critique and socio-technical systems and identify implications for future research.

Conspiracy Talk on Social Media: Collective Sensemaking during a Public Health Crisis

Conspiracy theories have gained much academic and media attention recently, due to their large impact on public events. Crisis informatics researchers have examined conspiracy theories as a type of rumor. However, little is known about how conspiracy theories are produced and developed on social media. We present a qualitative study of conspiracy theorizing on Reddit during a public health crisis--the Zika virus outbreak. Using a mixed-methods approach including content analysis and discourse analysis, we identified types of conspiracy theories that appeared on Reddit in response to the Zika crisis, the conditions under which Zika conspiracy theories emerge, and the particular discursive strategies through which Zika conspiracy theories developed in online forums. Our analysis shows that conspiracy talk emerged as people attempted to make sense of a public health crisis, reflecting their emergent information needs and their pervasive distrust in formal sources of Zika information. Practical implications for social computing researchers, health practitioners, and policymakers are discussed.

Complex Mediation in the Formation of Political Opinions

The Internet plays an important role in the formation of political opinions by supporting citizens in discovering diverse political information and opinions. However, the echo chamber effect has become of increasing concern, referring to the tendency for people to encounter opinions and information similar to their own online. It remains poorly understood how ordinary citizens use the Internet in the formation of political opinions. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with 32 Chinese citizens. We found that participants used complex strategies to coordinate personal networks and technologies in specific ways to better understand political events. To analyze this phenomenon, we draw on Bødker and Andersens model of complex mediation which describes how multiple mediators including people and artifacts work together to mediate an activity. We discuss how complex mediation supported participants in informing their political opinions. We derive design implications for supporting people to form political opinions.

Playing with Streakiness in Online Games: How Players Perceive and React to Winning and Losing Streaks in League of Legends

Streakiness refers to observed tendency towards consecutive appearances of particular patterns. In video games, streakiness is oftentimes inevitable, where a player keeps winning or losing for a short period. However, the phenomenon remains understudied in present online game research. How do players perceive streakiness? How does it impact player experience (PX)? How should streakiness be taken into consideration for the design of PX? In this paper, we address these questions through a qualitative study of player discussions about streakiness in League of Legends. We found that players developed various ways to describe a streak. Both winning and losing streaks negatively impacted PX. Players devised numerous strategies to manage streakiness, among which disengagement was a primary means. We analyze streakiness as a social construct through which players coped with complex game systems. We discuss design implications for managing streakiness in online games.

The Politics of Titling: The Representation of Countries in CHI Papers

For decades, HCI scholars have studied technological systems and their relationship to particular contexts and user groups. Increasingly, this scholarship is dependent not only on localized contexts, but also the relationship of local contexts to the global stage, drawing on approaches such as ICT4D and cross-cultural design. In this paper, we examine authors descriptions of study contexts, particularly country information, in paper titles and texts in the CHI Proceedings from 2013 to 2017. We found strikingly different patterns of titling between studies of Western and non-Western countries, including whether and how country names are mentioned in titles, and the precision when describing study contexts. Drawing on critical theories, we analyze how the politics of titling at CHI functions to build categories of normal and exotic. We explicate the problems that the current ways of representation bring to knowledge production at CHI, and necessary paths to move forward.