Hello, my name is Joel, and I am a designer and a doctoral researcher from Tampere University.
This presentation focuses on the question:
"How could user interface design help users to regulate their emotions in online discussions?"
In particular, we focus on the problem area of uncivil online news commenting.
We suppose everyone has seen uncivil comments to online news.
This has been widely problematized in both Media Studies and HCI.
In addition to causing harm to the involved commenters and readers, research indicates that uncivil
comments are harmful to journalists and moderators who cannot avoid reading them.
Now, why is this relevant to HCI?
The specific roles and influences of the user interface are little understood.
This calls for critical analysis of the current UI solutions as well as speculative exploration
of alternative designs.
Building on critical analysis of current UI design conventions,
this work speculates on several design provocations.
To this end, we draw from two theoretical frames in our design work.
The first is the design philosophy of Critical Design, which is increasingly being experimented
also in the UI design practice.
The second is the concept of self-reflection and affect labeling as an implicit mechanism
resulting in emotion regulation.
Recent psychological research has shown that affect labeling is effective
in terms of changing an emotional experience to be less negative.
For example, simply naming the emotion you experience when looking at this snake
might change your emotional experience to be less negative.
We set our goal to present sufficiently provocative forms of affect labeling in order to raise
awareness of and discussion of the roles and influences of the user-interface.
In the paper, we present four critical design propositions, analyze them in terms of their
critical nature, and interview news media experts to identify additional critical perspectives.
Next, I will briefly describe two of our designs and shed light on their discursive nature.
The first one is called the Audience.
It attempts to help a commenter to predict how other people might feel about the comment
that they are currently writing.
A variety of emotional reactions would be depicted through abstract human figures
to give a sense of a diverse live audience and the breadth of possible reactions.​
The design intends to underline how different text-based commenting is from public speaking
and face-to-face discussion in terms of who are in the audience
and how well its members can be understood.
Also, it proposes a future where people trust the interpretations of an algorithm
and could act accordingly.
The next design is called the Regret.
Here, a user’s comment is automatically evaluated right after posting.
If it sounds very angry, the user is notified
and offered a chance to regret their choice of words.
If the user chooses to regret, a notification is attached to the comment,
“username regretted their choice of words.”
The design is intended to ask if the publisher should ask online news commenters
to regret their choice of words.
Also, the design speculates on a possibility that users could retrospectively and easily
mark that they are not happy with their comment.​
We strongly encourage you to read the paper to learn more about our idea generation
and selection process, the other design artifacts with different critical perspectives,
as well as to learn what we learned about risks and opportunities in the designs
by interviewing experts who administer online discussions.​
Thank you for watching!