arXiv subjects

Gian-Luca Savino

Publications and source records attributed to Gian-Luca Savino.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Finding a Way Through the Social Media Labyrinth: Guiding Design Through User Expectations

Social networking services (SNS) have become integral to modern life to create and maintain meaningful relationships. Nevertheless, their historic growth of features has led to labyrinthine user interfaces (UIs) that often result in frustration among users - for instance, when trying to control privacy-related settings. This paper aims to mitigate labyrinthine UIs by studying users' expectations (N=21) through an online card sorting exercise based on 58 common SNS UI features, teaching us about their expectations regarding the importance of specific UI features and the frequency with which they use them. Our findings offer a valuable understanding of the relationship between the importance and frequency of UI features and provide design considerations for six identified UI feature groups. Through these findings, we inform the design and development of user-centred alternatives to current SNS interfaces that enable users to successfully navigate SNS and feel in control over their data by meeting their expectations.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Listening to the Voices: Describing Ethical Caveats of Conversational User Interfaces According to Experts and Frequent Users

Advances in natural language processing and understanding have led to a rapid growth in the popularity of conversational user interfaces (CUIs). While CUIs introduce novel benefits, they also yield risks that may exploit people's trust. Although research looking at unethical design deployed through graphical user interfaces (GUIs) established a thorough understanding of so-called dark patterns, there is a need to continue this discourse within the CUI community to understand potentially problematic interactions. Addressing this gap, we interviewed 27 participants from three cohorts: researchers, practitioners, and frequent users of CUIs. Applying thematic analysis, we construct five themes reflecting each cohort's insights about ethical design challenges and introduce the CUI Expectation Cycle, bridging system capabilities and user expectations while considering each theme's ethical caveats. This research aims to inform future development of CUIs to consider ethical constraints while adopting a human-centred approach.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Defending Against the Dark Arts: Recognising Dark Patterns in Social Media

Interest in unethical user interfaces has grown in HCI over recent years, with researchers identifying malicious design strategies referred to as ''dark patterns''. While such strategies have been described in numerous domains, we lack a thorough understanding of how they operate in social networking services (SNSs). Pivoting towards regulations against such practices, we address this gap by offering novel insights into the types of dark patterns deployed in SNSs and people's ability to recognise them across four widely used mobile SNS applications. Following a cognitive walkthrough, experts (N=6) could identify instances of dark patterns in all four SNSs, including co-occurrences. Based on the results, we designed a novel rating procedure for evaluating the malice of interfaces. Our evaluation shows that regular users (N=193) could differentiate between interfaces featuring dark patterns and those without. Such rating procedures could support policymakers' current moves to regulate deceptive and manipulative designs in online interfaces.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

About Engaging and Governing Strategies: A Thematic Analysis of Dark Patterns in Social Networking Services

Research in HCI has shown a growing interest in unethical design practices across numerous domains, often referred to as ``dark patterns''. There is, however, a gap in related literature regarding social networking services (SNSs). In this context, studies emphasise a lack of users' self-determination regarding control over personal data and time spent on SNSs. We collected over 16 hours of screen recordings from Facebook's, Instagram's, TikTok's, and Twitter's mobile applications to understand how dark patterns manifest in these SNSs. For this task, we turned towards HCI experts to mitigate possible difficulties of non-expert participants in recognising dark patterns, as prior studies have noticed. Supported by the recordings, two authors of this paper conducted a thematic analysis based on previously described taxonomies, manually classifying the recorded material while delivering two key findings: We observed which instances occur in SNSs and identified two strategies - engaging and governing - with five dark patterns undiscovered before.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Rules Of Engagement: Levelling Up To Combat Unethical CUI Design

While a central goal of HCI has always been to create and develop interfaces that are easy to use, a deeper focus has been set more recently on designing interfaces more ethically. However, the exact meaning and measurement of ethical design has yet to be established both within the CUI community and among HCI researchers more broadly. In this provocation paper we propose a simplified methodology to assess interfaces based on five dimensions taken from prior research on so-called dark patterns. As a result, our approach offers a numeric score to its users representing the manipulative nature of evaluated interfaces. It is hoped that the approach - which draws a distinction between persuasion and manipulative design, and focuses on how the latter functions rather than how it manifests - will provide a viable way for quantifying instances of unethical interface design that will prove useful to researchers, regulators and potentially even users.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Ethical User Interfaces: Exploring the Effects of Dark Patterns on Facebook

Many researchers have been concerned with whether social media has a negative impact on the well-being of their audience. With the popularity of social networking sites (SNS) steadily increasing, psychological and social sciences have shown great interest in their effects and consequences on humans. In this work, we investigate Facebook using the tools of HCI to find connections between interface features and the concerns raised by these domains. Using an empirical design analysis, we identify interface interferences impacting users' online privacy. Through a subsequent survey (n=116), we find usage behaviour changes due to increased privacy concerns and report individual cases of addiction and mental health issues. These observations are the results of a rapidly changing SNS creating a gap of understanding between users' interactions with the platform and future consequences. We explore how HCI can help close this gap and work towards more ethical user interfaces in the future.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

How Social Are Social Media The Dark Patterns In Facebook's Interface

Many researchers have been concerned with social media and possible negative impacts on the well-being of their audience. With the popularity of social networking sites (SNS) steadily increasing, psychological and social sciences have shown great interest in their effects and consequences on humans. Unfortunately, it appears to be difficult to find correlations between SNS and the results of their works. We, therefore, investigate Facebook using the tools of HCI to find connections between interface features and the concerns raised by these domains. With a nod towards Dark Patterns, we use an empirical design analysis to identify interface interferences that impact users' online privacy. We further discuss how HCI can help to work towards more ethical user interfaces in the future.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Comparing Pedestrian Navigation Methods in Virtual Reality and Real Life

Mobile navigation apps are among the most used mobile applications and are often used as a baseline to evaluate new mobile navigation technologies in field studies. As field studies often introduce external factors that are hard to control for, we investigate how pedestrian navigation methods can be evaluated in virtual reality (VR). We present a study comparing navigation methods in real life (RL) and VR to evaluate if VR environments are a viable alternative to RL environments when it comes to testing these. In a series of studies, participants navigated a real and a virtual environment using a paper map and a navigation app on a smartphone. We measured the differences in navigation performance, task load and spatial knowledge acquisition between RL and VR. From these we formulate guidelines for the improvement of pedestrian navigation systems in VR like improved legibility for small screen devices. We furthermore discuss appropriate low-cost and low-space VR-locomotion techniques and discuss more controllable locomotion techniques.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Virtual Smartphone: High Fidelity Interaction with Proxy Objects in Virtual Reality

This workshop paper presents two proxy objects for high fidelity interaction in virtual reality (VR): a paper map and a smartphone. We showcase how our virtual paper map can increase interactivity and orientation, while our virtual smartphone extends the use of a proxy object, as it allows for actual touch input on a real phone leading to an almost infinite set of possible (inter-)actions (e.g. snapping pictures in the virtual world). Observations showed that participants were very precise in holding and interacting with both the paper map and the smartphone even though they did not see their hands in VR. The interaction in general was very intuitive which was mostly attributed to the realistic size of the virtual objects. Using our findings we discuss the trade off between adaptivity and high fidelity of proxy objects in VR.

cs.HC↗