How Notations Evolve: A Historical Analysis with Implications for Supporting User-Defined AbstractionsTraditional human-computer interaction takes place through formally-specified systems like structured UIs and programming languages. Recent AI systems promise a new set of informal interactions with computers through natural language and other notational forms. These informal interactions can then lead to formal representations, but depend upon pre-existing formalisms known to both humans and AI. What about novel formalisms and notations? How are new abstractions created, evolved, and incrementally formalized over time -- and how might new systems, in turn, be explicitly designed to support these processes? We conduct a comparative historical analysis of notation development to identify some relevant characteristics. These include three social stages of notation development: invention & incubation, dispersion & divergence, and institutionalization & sanctification, as well as three functional stages: descriptive, generative, and evaluative. Within and across these stages, we detail several patterns, such as the role of linking and grounding metaphors, dimensions of meaningful variation, and analogical alignment. Finally, we offer some implications for design.2026JZJingyue Zhang et al.Université de montréalGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Human-LLM CollaborationParticipatory DesignCHI
Interrogating AI: Characterizing Emergent Playful Interactions with ChatGPTIn an era of AI's growing capabilities and influences, recent advancements are reshaping HCI and CSCW's view of AI. Playful interactions emerged as an important way for users to make sense of the ever-changing AI technologies, yet remained underexamined. We target this gap by investigating playful interactions exhibited by users of a popular AI technology, ChatGPT. Through a thematic analysis of 372 user-generated posts on the ChatGPT subreddit, we found that more than half (54%) of user discourse revolved around playful interactions. The analysis further allowed us to construct a preliminary framework to describe these interactions, categorizing them into six types: reflecting, jesting, imitating, challenging, tricking, and contriving; each included sub-categories. This study contributes to HCI and CSCW by identifying the diverse ways users engage in playful interactions with AI. It examines how these interactions can help users understand AI's agency, shape human-AI relationships, and provide insights for designing AI systems.2025MNMohammad Ronagh Nikghalb et al.Communicating With/Through AICSCW
Who is to Blame: A Comprehensive Review of Challenges and Opportunities in Designer-Developer CollaborationSoftware development relies on effective collaboration between Software Development Engineers (SDEs) and User eXperience Designers (UXDs) to create software products of high quality and usability. While this collaboration issue has been explored over the past decades, anecdotal evidence continues to indicate the existence of challenges in their collaborative efforts. To understand this gap, we first conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 45 papers published since 2004, uncovering three key collaboration challenges and two main categories of potential best practices. We then analyzed designer and developer forums and discussions from one open-source software repository to assess how the challenges and practices manifest in the status quo. Our findings have broad applicability for collaboration in software development, extending beyond the partnership between SDEs and UXDs. The suggested best practices and interventions also act as a reference for future research, assisting in the development of dedicated collaboration tools for SDEs and UXDs.2025SZShutong Zhang et al.Team Work Makes the Dream WorkCSCW
"Ohhh, he's the boss!": Unpacking Power Dynamics Among Developers, Designers, and End-Users in FLOSS UsabilityAddressing usability in free, libre, and open-source software (FLOSS) is a challenging issue, particularly due to a long-existing ``by developer, for developer'' mentality. Engaging designers and end-users to work with developers can help improve its usability, but unequal power dynamics among those stakeholder roles must be mitigated. To explore how the power of different FLOSS stakeholders manifests and can be mediated during collaboration, we conducted eight design workshops with different combinations of key FLOSS stakeholders (i.e., developers, designers, and end-users). Leveraging existing theories on Dimensions of Power, we revealed how participants navigate existing role-based power structures through resource utilization, knowledge gap management, and experience referencing. We also observed that participants exhibited diverse behaviors confirming and challenging the status quo of FLOSS usability. Overall, our results contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the power dynamics among FLOSS stakeholders and provide valuable insights into ways to balance their power to improve FLOSS usability. Our work also serves as an exemplar of using design workshops as a research method to study power dynamics in collaboration that are usually hidden in the field.2025JHJazlyn Hellman et al.Open Source CommunitiesCSCW
Semantic Commit: Helping Users Update Intent Specifications for AI Memory at ScaleAs AI agents increasingly rely on memory systems to align with user intent, updating these memories presents challenges of semantic conflict and ambiguity. Inspired by impact analysis in software engineering, we introduce SemanticCommit, a mixed-initiative interface to help users integrate new intent into intent specifications—natural language documents like AI memory lists, Cursor Rules, and game design documents—while maintaining consistency. SemanticCommit detects potential semantic conflicts using a knowledge graph-based retrieval-augmented generation pipeline, and assists users in resolving them with LLM support. Through a within-subjects study with 12 participants comparing SemanticCommit to a chat-with-document baseline (OpenAI Canvas), we find differences in workflow: half of our participants adopted a workflow of impact analysis when using SemanticCommit, where they would first flag conflicts without AI revisions then resolve conflicts locally, despite having access to a global revision feature. Additionally, users felt SemanticCommit offered a greater sense of control without increasing workload. Our findings indicate that AI agent interfaces should help users validate AI retrieval independently from generation, suggesting that the benefits from improved control can offset the costs of manual review. Our work speaks to the need for AI system designers to think about updating memory as a process that involves human feedback and decision-making.2025PVPriyan Vaithilingam et al.Human-LLM CollaborationAI-Assisted Decision-Making & AutomationAlgorithmic Transparency & AuditabilityUIST
Dancing With Chains: Ideating Under Constraints With UIDEC in UI/UX DesignUI/UX designers often work under constraints like brand identity, design norms, and industry guidelines. How these constraints impact designers' ideation and exploration processes should be addressed in creativity-support tools for design. Through an exploratory interview study, we identified three designer personas with varying views on having constraints in the ideation process, which guided the creation of UIDEC, a GenAI-powered tool for supporting creativity under constraints. UIDEC allows designers to specify project details, such as purpose, target audience, industry, and design styles, based on which it generates diverse design examples that adhere to these constraints, with minimal need to write prompts. In a user evaluation involving designers representing the identified personas, participants found UIDEC compatible with their existing ideation process and useful for creative inspiration, especially when starting new projects. Our work provides design implications to AI-powered tools that integrate constraints during UI/UX design ideation to support creativity.2025َSَAtefeh Shokrizadeh et al.Polytechnique Montreal, Computer and Software Engineering360° Video & Panoramic ContentGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Human-LLM CollaborationCHI
Beyond Automation: How Designers Perceive AI as a Creative Partner in the Divergent Thinking Stages of UI/UX DesignDivergent thinking activities, like research and ideation, are key drivers of innovation in UI/UX design. Existing research has explored AI's role in automating design tasks, but leaves a critical gap in understanding how AI specifically influences divergent thinking. To address this, we conducted interviews with 19 professional UI/UX designers, examining their use and perception of AI in these creative activities. We found that in this context, participants valued AI tools that offer greater control over ideation, facilitate collaboration, enhance efficiency to liberate creativity, and align with their visual habits. Our results indicated four key roles AI plays in supporting divergent thinking: aiding research, kick-starting creativity, generating design alternatives, and facilitating prototype exploration. Through this study, we provide insights into the evolving role of AI in the less-investigated area of divergent thinking in UI/UX design, offering recommendations for future AI tools that better support design innovation.2025AKAbidullah Khan et al.Polytechnique Montreal360° Video & Panoramic ContentHuman-LLM CollaborationCHI
Motivating Users to Attend to Privacy: A Theory-Driven Design StudyIn modern technology environments, raising users' privacy awareness is crucial. Existing efforts largely focused on privacy policy presentation and failed to systematically address a radical challenge of user motivation for initiating privacy awareness. Leveraging the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), we proposed design ideas and categories dedicated to motivating users to engage with privacy-related information. Using these design ideas, we created a conceptual prototype, enhancing the current App Store product page. Results from an online experiment and follow-up interviews showed that our design effectively motivated participants to attend to privacy issues, raising both the threat appraisal and coping appraisal, two main factors in PMT. Our work indicated that effective design should consider combining PMT components, calibrating information content, and integrating other design elements, such as visual cues and user familiarity. Overall, our study contributes valuable design considerations driven by the PMT to amplify the motivational aspect of privacy communication.2024VSVarun Shiri et al.Privacy by Design & User ControlPrivacy Perception & Decision-MakingDIS
"It's Sink or Swim": Exploring Patients' Challenges and Tool Needs for Self-Management of Postoperative Acute PainPoorly managed postoperative acute pain can have long-lasting negative impacts and pose a major healthcare issue. There is limited investigation to understand and address the unique needs of patients experiencing acute pain. In this paper, we tackle this gap through an interview study with 14 patients who recently underwent postoperative acute pain to understand their challenges in pain self-management and their need for supportive tools. Our analysis identified various factors associated with the major aspects of acute pain self-management. Together, our findings indicated that tools for supporting these patients need to carefully consider information and support delivery to adapt to rapid changes in pain experiences, offer personalized and dynamic assistance that adapts to individual situations in context, and monitor emotion when promoting motivation. Overall, our work provided valuable knowledge to address the less-investigated but highly-needed problem of designing technology for the self-management of acute pain and similar health conditions.2024SZSouleima Zghab et al.Polytechnique MontrealMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesChronic Disease Self-Management (Diabetes, Hypertension, etc.)CHI
SUMMIT: Scaffolding Open Source Software Issue Discussion through SummarizationIssue Tracking Systems (ITS) often support commenting on software issues, which create a space for discussions centered around bug fixes and improvements to the software. For Open Source Software (OSS) projects, issue discussions serve as a crucial collaboration mechanism for diverse stakeholders. However, issue discussions can become lengthy, making it hard to find relevant information and make further contributions. In this work, we study the use of summarization to aid users in collaboratively making sense of OSS issue discussion threads. Through an empirical investigation, we reveal a complex picture of how summarization is used by issue users as a strategy to help develop and manage their discussions. Grounded on the different objectives served by the summaries and the outcome of our formative study with OSS stakeholders, we identified a set of guidelines to inform the design of collaborative summarization tools for OSS issue discussions. We then developed SUMMIT, a tool that allows issue users to collectively construct summaries of different types of information discussed, as well as those outlining a set of comments within the thread. To alleviate the manual effort involved, SUMMIT uses techniques that automatically detect information types and summarize texts to facilitate the generation of these summaries. A lab user study indicates that, as the users of SUMMIT, OSS stakeholders adopted different strategies to acquire information on issue threads. Furthermore, different features of SUMMIT effectively lowered the perceived difficulty of locating information from issue threads and enabled the users to prioritize their effort. Overall, our findings demonstrated the potential of SUMMIT, and the corresponding design guidelines, in supporting users to acquire information from lengthy discussions in ITSs. Our work sheds light on the key considerations when exploring crowd-based and machine-learning-enabled instruments for asynchronous collaboration on complex tasks such as OSS development.2023SGSaskia Gilmer et al.Collaboration ICSCW
"Finding the Magic Sauce": Exploring Perspectives of Recruiters and Job Seekers on Recruitment Bias and Automated ToolsAutomated recruitment tools are proliferating. While having the promise of improving efficiency, various risks, including bias, challenges the potential of these tools. An in-depth understanding of the perceived risk factors and needs from the perspective of both recruiters and job seekers is needed. We address this through an interview study in the high-tech industry to compare and contrast the concerns of these two roles. We found that the importance of clarifying position requirements and assessing candidates as "whole individuals" are commonly discussed by both recruiters and job seekers. In contrast, while recruiters tended to be more aware of cognitive bias and desired more tool support during interviews, job seekers voiced more desire towards a healthy candidate-company relationship. Additionally, both roles considered the uncertainty of the current technology capability and reduced human contact as concerns for using automated tools. Based on these results, we provided design implications for automated recruitment tools and related decision-support technologies.2023MLMitra Lashkari et al.Polytechnique MontrealAI-Assisted Decision-Making & AutomationAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityAlgorithmic Fairness & BiasCHI
GANSpiration: Balancing Targeted and Serendipitous Inspiration in User Interface Design with Style-Based Generative Adversarial NetworkInspiration from design examples plays a crucial role in the creative process of user interface design. However, current tools and techniques that support inspiration usually only focus on example browsing with limited user control or similarity-based example retrieval, leading to undesirable design outcomes such as focus drift and design fixation. To address these issues, we propose the GANSpiration approach that suggests design examples for both targeted and serendipitous inspiration, leveraging a style-based Generative Adversarial Network. A quantitative evaluation revealed that the outputs of GANSpiration-based example suggestion approaches are relevant to the input design, and at the same time include diverse instances. A user study with professional UI/UX practitioners showed that the examples suggested by our approach serve as viable sources of inspiration for overall design concepts and specific design elements. Overall, our work paves the road of using advanced generative machine learning techniques in supporting the creative design practice.2022MMMohammad Amin Mozaffari et al.Polytechnique Montreal360° Video & Panoramic ContentGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Human-LLM CollaborationCHI
The "Shut the f**k up'' Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review DiscussionsCode review is an important quality assurance activity for software development. Code review discussions among developers and maintainers can be heated and sometimes involve personal attacks and unnecessary disrespectful comments, demonstrating, therefore, incivility. Although incivility in public discussions has received increasing attention from researchers in different domains, the knowledge about the characteristics, causes, and consequences of uncivil communication is still very limited in the context of software development, and more specifically, code review. To address this gap in the literature, we leverage the mature social construct of incivility as a lens to understand confrontational conflicts in open source code review discussions. For that, we conducted a qualitative analysis on 1,545 emails from the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) that were associated with rejected changes. We found that more than half (66.66%) of the non-technical emails included uncivil features. Particularly, frustration, name calling, and impatience are the most frequent features in uncivil emails. We also found that there are civil alternatives to address arguments, while uncivil comments can potentially be made by any people when discussing any topic. Finally, we identified various causes and consequences of such uncivil communication. Our work serves as the first study about the phenomenon of in(civility) in open source software development, paving the road for a new field of research about collaboration and communication in the context of software engineering activities.2021IFIsabella Ferreira et al.Open CollaborationCSCW
Augmented Reality to Enable Users in Learning Case Grammar from Their Real-World InteractionsAugmented Reality (AR) provides a unique opportunity to situate learning content in one's environment. In this work, we investigated how AR could be developed to provide an interactive context-based language learning experience. Specifically, we developed a novel handheld-AR app for learning case grammar by dynamically creating quizzes, based on real-life objects in the learner's surroundings. We compared this to the experience of learning with a non-contextual app that presented the same quizzes with static photographic images. Participants found AR suitable for use in their everyday lives and enjoyed the interactive experience of exploring grammatical relationships in their surroundings. Nonetheless, Bayesian tests provide substantial evidence that the interactive and context-embedded AR app did not improve case grammar skills, vocabulary retention, and usability over the experience with equivalent static images. Based on this, we propose how language learning apps could be designed to combine the benefits of contextual AR and traditional approaches.2020FDFiona Draxler et al.Ludwig Maximilian University of MunichAR Navigation & Context AwarenessSTEM Education & Science CommunicationCHI
ArguLens: Anatomy of Community Opinions On Usability Issues Using Argumentation ModelsIn open-source software (OSS), the design of usability is often influenced by the discussions among community members on platforms such as issue tracking systems (ITSs). However, digesting the rich information embedded in issue discussions can be a major challenge due to the vast number and diversity of the comments. We propose and evaluate ArguLens, a conceptual framework and automated technique leveraging an argumentation model to support effective understanding and consolidation of community opinions in ITSs. Through content analysis, we anatomized highly discussed usability issues from a large, active OSS project, into their argumentation components and standpoints. We then experimented with supervised machine learning techniques for automated argument extraction. Finally, through a study with experienced ITS users, we show that the information provided by ArguLens supported the digestion of usability-related opinions and facilitated the review of lengthy issues. ArguLens provides the direction of designing valuable tools for high-level reasoning and effective discussion about usability.2020WWWenting Wang et al.McGill UniversityGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Crowdsourcing Task Design & Quality ControlUser Research Methods (Interviews, Surveys, Observation)CHI
KeyTime: Super-Accurate Prediction of Stroke Gesture Production TimesWe introduce KeyTime, a new technique and accompanying software for predicting the production times of users' stroke gestures articulated on touchscreens. KeyTime employs the principles and concepts of the Kinematic Theory, such as lognormal modeling of stroke gestures' velocity profiles, to estimate gesture production times significantly more accurately than existing approaches. Our experimental results obtained on several public datasets show that KeyTime predicts user-independent production times that correlate r=.99 with groundtruth from just one example of a gesture articulation, while delivering an average error in the predicted time magnitude that is 3 to 6 times smaller than that delivered by CLC, the best prediction technique up to date. Moreover, KeyTime reports a wide range of useful statistics, such as the trimmed mean, median, standard deviation, and confidence intervals, providing practitioners with unprecedented levels of accuracy and sophistication to characterize their users' a priori time performance with stroke gesture input.2018LLLuis A. Leiva et al.ScilingFull-Body Interaction & Embodied InputHuman Pose & Activity RecognitionCHI