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Andrés Monroy-Hernández

Publications and source records attributed to Andrés Monroy-Hernández.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2025

Understanding Decentralized Social Feed Curation on Mastodon

As centralized social media platforms face growing concerns, more users are seeking greater control over their social feeds and turning to decentralized alternatives such as Mastodon. The decentralized nature of Mastodon creates unique opportunities for customizing feeds, yet user perceptions and curation strategies on these platforms remain unknown. This paper presents findings from a two-part interview study with 21 Mastodon users, exploring how they perceive, interact with, and manage their current feeds, and how we can better empower users to personalize their feeds on Mastodon. We use the qualitative findings of the first part of the study to guide the creation of Braids, a web-based prototype for feed curation. Results from the second part of our study, using Braids, highlighted opportunities and challenges for future research, particularly in using seamful design to enhance people's acceptance of algorithmic curation and nuanced trade-offs between machine learning-based and rule-based curation algorithms. To optimize user experience, we also discuss the tension between creating new apps and building add-ons in the decentralized social media realm.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2025

ARctic Escape: Promoting Social Connection, Teamwork, and Collaboration Using a Co-Located Augmented Reality Escape Room

We present ARctic Escape, a co-located augmented reality (AR) escape room designed to promote collaboration between dyads through play. While physical escape rooms provide groups with fun, social experiences, they require a gameplay venue, props, and a game master, all of which detract from their ease of access. Existing AR escape rooms demonstrate that AR can make escape room experiences easier to access. Still, many AR escape rooms are single-player and therefore fail to maintain the social and collaborative elements of their physical counterparts. This paper presents ARctic Escape, a two-person AR escape room with clues emphasizing player interaction and teamwork. We evaluated ARctic Escape by conducting semi-structured interviews with four dyads to learn about participants' interpersonal dynamics and experiences during gameplay. We found that participants thought the experience was fun, collaborative, promoted discussion, and inspired new social dynamics, but sometimes the escape room's reliance on virtual content was disorienting.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2025

QuaLLM: An LLM-based Framework to Extract Quantitative Insights from Online Forums

Online discussion forums provide crucial data to understand the concerns of a wide range of real-world communities. However, the typical qualitative and quantitative methodologies used to analyze those data, such as thematic analysis and topic modeling, are infeasible to scale or require significant human effort to translate outputs to human readable forms. This study introduces QuaLLM, a novel LLM-based framework to analyze and extract quantitative insights from text data on online forums. The framework consists of a novel prompting and human evaluation methodology. We applied this framework to analyze over one million comments from two of Reddit's rideshare worker communities, marking the largest study of its type. We uncover significant worker concerns regarding AI and algorithmic platform decisions, responding to regulatory calls about worker insights. In short, our work sets a new precedent for AI-assisted quantitative data analysis to surface concerns from online forums.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

Rideshare Transparency: Translating Gig Worker Insights on AI Platform Design to Policy

Rideshare platforms exert significant control over workers through algorithmic systems that can result in financial, emotional, and physical harm. What steps can platforms, designers, and practitioners take to mitigate these negative impacts and meet worker needs? In this paper, we identify transparency-related harms, mitigation strategies, and worker needs while validating and contextualizing our findings within the broader worker community. We use a novel mixed-methods study combining an LLM-based analysis of over 1 million comments posted to online platform worker communities with semi-structured interviews with workers. Our findings expose a transparency gap between existing platform designs and the information drivers need, particularly concerning promotions, fares, routes, and task allocation. Our analysis suggests that rideshare workers need key pieces of information, which we refer to as indicators, to make informed work decisions. These indicators include details about rides, driver statistics, algorithmic implementation details, and platform policy information. We argue that instead of relying on platforms to include such information in their designs, new regulations requiring platforms to publish public transparency reports may be a more effective solution to improve worker well-being. We offer recommendations for implementing such a policy.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2025

Jigsaw: Authoring Immersive Storytelling Experiences with Augmented Reality and Internet of Things

Augmented Reality (AR) presents new opportunities for immersive storytelling. However, this immersiveness faces two main hurdles. First, AR's immersive quality is often confined to visual elements, such as pixels on a screen. Second, crafting immersive narratives is complex and generally beyond the reach of amateurs due to the need for advanced technical skills. We introduce Jigsaw, a system that empowers beginners to both experience and craft immersive stories, blending virtual and physical elements. Jigsaw uniquely combines mobile AR with readily available Internet-of-things (IoT) devices. We conducted a qualitative study with 20 participants to assess Jigsaw's effectiveness in both consuming and creating immersive narratives. The results were promising: participants not only successfully created their own immersive stories but also found the playback of three such stories deeply engaging. However, sensory overload emerged as a significant challenge in these experiences. We discuss design trade-offs and considerations for future endeavors in immersive storytelling involving AR and IoT.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2024

Understanding Young People's Creative Goals with Augmented Reality

Young people are major consumers of Augmented Reality (AR) tools like Pokémon GO, but they rarely engage in creating these experiences. Creating with technology gives young people a platform for expressing themselves and making social connections. However, we do not know what young people want to create with AR, as existing AR authoring tools are largely designed for adults. To investigate the requirements for an AR authoring tool, we ran eight design workshops with 17 young people in Argentina and the United States that centered on young people's perspectives and experiences. We identified four ways in which young people want to create with} AR, and contribute the following design implications for designers of AR authoring tools for young people: (1) Blending imagination into AR scenarios to preserve narratives, (2) Making traces of actions visible to foster social presence, (3) Exploring how AR artifacts can serve as invitations to connect with others, and (4) Leveraging information asymmetry to encourage learning about the physical world.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2024

With or Without Permission: Site-Specific Augmented Reality for Social Justice

Movements for social change are often tied to a particular locale. This makes Augmented Reality (AR), which changes how people perceive their surroundings, a promising technology for social justice. Site-specific AR empowers activists to re-tell the story of a place, with or without permission of its owner. It has been used, for example, to reveal hidden histories, re-imagine problematic monuments, and celebrate minority cultures. However, challenges remain concerning technological ownership and accessibility, scalability, sustainability, and navigating collaborations with marginalized communities and across disciplinary boundaries. This half-day workshop at CHI 2024 seeks to bring together an interdisciplinary group of activists, computer scientists, designers, media scholars, and more to identify opportunities and challenges across domains. To anchor the discussion, participants will each share one example of an artifact used in speculating, designing, and/or delivering site-specific AR experiences. This collection of artifacts will inaugurate an interactive database that can inspire a new wave of activists to leverage AR for social justice.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2024

The Future of Research on Social Technologies: CCC Workshop Visioning Report

Social technologies are the systems, interfaces, features, infrastructures, and architectures that allow people to interact with each other online. These technologies dramatically shape the fabric of our everyday lives, from the information we consume to the people we interact with to the foundations of our culture and politics. While the benefits of social technologies are well documented, the harms, too, have cast a long shadow. To address widespread problems like harassment, disinformation, information access, and mental health concerns, we need to rethink the foundations of how social technologies are designed, sustained, and governed. This report is based on discussions at the Computing Community Consortium Workshop, The Future of Research on Social Technologies, that was held November 2-3, 2023 in Washington, DC. The visioning workshop came together to focus on two questions. What should we know about social technologies, and what is needed to get there? The workshop brought together over 50 information and computer scientists, social scientists, communication and journalism scholars, and policy experts. We used a discussion format, with one day of guiding topics and a second day using an unconference model where participants created discussion topics. The interdisciplinary group of attendees discussed gaps in existing scholarship and the methods, resources, access, and collective effort needed to address those gaps. We also discussed approaches for translating scholarship for various audiences including citizens, funders, educators, industry professionals, and policymakers. This report presents a synthesis of major themes during our discussions. The themes presented are not a summary of what we know already, they are an exploration of what we do not know enough about, and what we should spend more effort and investment on in the coming years.

cs.SI↗
arXiv2024

Mapping the Landscape of Independent Food Delivery Platforms in the United States

Beyond the well-known giants like Uber Eats and DoorDash, there are hundreds of independent food delivery platforms in the United States. However, little is known about the sociotechnical landscape of these ``indie'' platforms. In this paper, we analyzed these platforms to understand why they were created, how they operate, and what technologies they use. We collected data on 495 indie platforms and detailed survey responses from 29 platforms. We found that personalized, timely service is a central value of indie platforms, as is a sense of responsibility to the local community they serve. Indie platforms are motivated to provide fair rates for restaurants and couriers. These alternative business practices differentiate them from mainstream platforms. Though indie platforms have plans to expand, a lack of customizability in off-the-shelf software prevents independent platforms from personalizing services for their local communities. We show that these platforms are a widespread and longstanding fixture of the food delivery market. We illustrate the diversity of motivations and values to explain why a one-size-fits-all support is insufficient, and we discuss the siloing of technology that inhibits platforms' growth. Through these insights, we aim to promote future HCI research into the potential development of public-interest technologies for local food delivery.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Ball-AR: Fostering Playful Co-Located Interaction Through Environment-centric Physical Activity with AR

We present Ball-AR, an augmented reality (AR) game where two players in the same physical space attempt to hit each other with virtual dodgeballs overlaid on the physical world. Researchers have studied AR's potential for fostering co-located interaction and physical activity; however, they have not investigated the impacts of physical activity and physical environment on user experiences and interaction. We created an AR dodgeball game centered around encouraging physical activity and harnessing the physical environment. We then evaluated the game with five dyads to analyze the impacts of these design choices on the quality of gameplay and interaction between players. We found that physical activity and the shared physical space created memorable experiences and interactions among participants, although participants desired a more augmented and immersive experience.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Beyond Screens: Supporting Co-located Augmented Reality Experiences with Smart Home Devices

We introduce Spooky Spirits, an AR game that makes novel use of everyday smart home devices to support co-located play. Recent exploration of co-located AR experiences consists mainly of digital visual augmentations on mobile or head-mounted screens. In this work, we leverage widely adopted smart lightbulbs to expand AR capabilities beyond the digital and into the physical world, further leveraging the physicality of users' shared environment.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Social Wormholes: Exploring Preferences and Opportunities for Distributed and Physically-Grounded Social Connections

Ubiquitous computing encapsulates the idea for technology to be interwoven into the fabric of everyday life. As computing blends into everyday physical artifacts, powerful opportunities open up for social connection. Prior connected media objects span a broad spectrum of design combinations. Such diversity suggests that people have varying needs and preferences for staying connected to one another. However, since these designs have largely been studied in isolation, we do not have a holistic understanding around how people would configure and behave within a ubiquitous social ecosystem of physically-grounded artifacts. In this paper, we create a technology probe called Social Wormholes, that lets people configure their own home ecosystem of connected artifacts. Through a field study with 24 participants, we report on patterns of behaviors that emerged naturally in the context of their daily lives and shine a light on how ubiquitous computing could be leveraged for social computing.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Humans, AI, and Context: Understanding End-Users' Trust in a Real-World Computer Vision Application

Trust is an important factor in people's interactions with AI systems. However, there is a lack of empirical studies examining how real end-users trust or distrust the AI system they interact with. Most research investigates one aspect of trust in lab settings with hypothetical end-users. In this paper, we provide a holistic and nuanced understanding of trust in AI through a qualitative case study of a real-world computer vision application. We report findings from interviews with 20 end-users of a popular, AI-based bird identification app where we inquired about their trust in the app from many angles. We find participants perceived the app as trustworthy and trusted it, but selectively accepted app outputs after engaging in verification behaviors, and decided against app adoption in certain high-stakes scenarios. We also find domain knowledge and context are important factors for trust-related assessment and decision-making. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for future research on trust in AI.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Should Policymakers be Involved? Understanding the Opinions and Needs for Independent Food Delivery Platforms in the United States regarding Public Policy

Mainstream food delivery platforms, like DoorDash and Uber Eats, have been the locus of fierce policy debates about their unfair business and labor practices. At the same time, hundreds of independent food delivery services provide alternative opportunities to many communities across the U.S. We surveyed operators of independent food delivery platforms to learn about their perception of the role of public policy. We found conflicting opinions on whether and how policy should interact with their businesses, ranging from not wanting policymakers to interfere to articulating specific policies that would curtail mainstream platforms' business practices. We provide insights for technologists and policymakers interested in the sociotechnical challenges of local marketplaces.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Supporting Piggybacked Co-Located Leisure Activities via Augmented Reality

Technology, especially the smartphone, is villainized for taking meaning and time away from in-person interactions and secluding people into "digital bubbles". We believe this is not an intrinsic property of digital gadgets, but evidence of a lack of imagination in technology design. Leveraging augmented reality (AR) toward this end allows us to create experiences for multiple people, their pets, and their environments. In this work, we explore the design of AR technology that "piggybacks" on everyday leisure to foster co-located interactions among close ties (with other people and pets. We designed, developed, and deployed three such AR applications, and evaluated them through a 41-participant and 19-pet user study. We gained key insights about the ability of AR to spur and enrich interaction in new channels, the importance of customization, and the challenges of designing for the physical aspects of AR devices (e.g., holding smartphones). These insights guide design implications for the novel research space of co-located AR.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Understanding Human Intervention in the Platform Economy: A case study of an indie food delivery service

This paper examines the sociotechnical infrastructure of an "indie" food delivery platform. The platform, Nosh, provides an alternative to mainstream services, such as Doordash and Uber Eats, in several communities in the Western United States. We interviewed 28 stakeholders including restauranteurs, couriers, consumers, and platform administrators. Drawing on infrastructure literature, we learned that the platform is a patchwork of disparate technical systems held together by human intervention. Participants join this platform because they receive greater agency, financial security, and local support. We identify human intervention's key role in making food delivery platform users feel respected. This study provides insights into the affordances, limitations, and possibilities of food delivery platforms designed to prioritize local contexts over transnational scales.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

"Help Me Help the AI": Understanding How Explainability Can Support Human-AI Interaction

Despite the proliferation of explainable AI (XAI) methods, little is understood about end-users' explainability needs and behaviors around XAI explanations. To address this gap and contribute to understanding how explainability can support human-AI interaction, we conducted a mixed-methods study with 20 end-users of a real-world AI application, the Merlin bird identification app, and inquired about their XAI needs, uses, and perceptions. We found that participants desire practically useful information that can improve their collaboration with the AI, more so than technical system details. Relatedly, participants intended to use XAI explanations for various purposes beyond understanding the AI's outputs: calibrating trust, improving their task skills, changing their behavior to supply better inputs to the AI, and giving constructive feedback to developers. Finally, among existing XAI approaches, participants preferred part-based explanations that resemble human reasoning and explanations. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for future XAI design.

cs.HC↗