arXiv subjects

Jinghui Cheng

Publications and source records attributed to Jinghui Cheng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Stitching the Divide: Investigating Mixed Reality as a Bridge Between Paper-Based and Digital Artifacts in UI/UX Design

UI/UX designers work with both paper-based and digital artifacts but lack tools that seamlessly integrate the two. Mixed Reality (MR) offers under-explored opportunities to combine the strengths of both design environments. To examine these opportunities, we first conducted interviews with 19 professional UI/UX designers to understand their current experiences using paper and digital artifacts. Motivated and informed by the interview insights, we organized nine conceptual-probe user study sessions in which designers engaged with a MR-probe that combined paper and digital prototyping processes and brainstormed MR's potential in UI/UX design. We found that participants valued MR for enabling continuous hybrid design workflows, reducing manual reconstruction, supporting spatially anchored workspaces, and facilitating real-time cross-medium collaboration. They also envisioned future MR tools with AI assistance, richer interactive and dynamic content, and the ability to manage diverse design artifacts within a unified environment. From these findings, we derive four design dimensions for future MR systems that could enable more fluid, creative, and collaborative design practices.

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arXiv2026

What If We Work Together? Fostering Reflections on Designer Inclusion in Open Source Software Through Speculative Design

Open source software (OSS) often prioritizes technical functionality over usability and UX design. This imbalance limits OSS adoption among broader, non-technical users. Key underlying factors contributing to this issue are the shortage of design expertise in OSS and a dominant developer-centric mindset. To address these persistent issues, we explore the potential of speculative design as a catalyst for transforming the OSS community's mindset towards a more designer-inclusive environment. Our design was informed by an analysis of online forums, which revealed designers' motivations and challenges when contributing to OSS. Guided by these insights, we created two speculative societies, Husia (collectivist) and Reetar (individualist), in which designers are valued for different reasons and their work incorporated in different ways. Through a user study with 12 OSS practitioners (seven designers and five developers), we found that our speculative societies provoked participants' rich and critical reflections on OSS values, the root causes of challenges, and proposed actions. Our work provides insights into how speculative design can be used in the practical, sociotechnical context of OSS to stimulate critical reflection, improve awareness, and yield recommendations for fostering an equitable, sustainable, and inclusive OSS environment.

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arXiv2026

"We Wanted to Do Better Than the Law": Exploring UI/UX Designers' Privacy Advocacy in Practice

Designers hold primary responsibility for shaping the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of a product. This role goes beyond aesthetics and usability, extending to the privacy outcomes of user experience, which often emerge through collaboration with other stakeholders such as developers, product managers, and marketing teams. Previous studies on enhancing privacy for technological products primarily focused on the roles of developers -- understanding their needs and challenges -- but limited effort is devoted to examining how UI/UX designers consider and approach privacy in their work. Through 12 semi-structured interviews with privacy-advocating UI/UX designers, we explore the perceptions, influencing factors, challenges, and adaptive methods they use regarding privacy implementation. We pay special attention to how these challenges and adaptations play out in team-based settings where decisions are negotiated together. Our study reveals how personal and contextual factors shape designers' value of privacy, the collaborative nature of the challenges designers face when trying to prioritize privacy, and how they navigate tensions between business goals, team dynamics, and technical development. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for advocating a user-centered approach for supporting privacy-aware design, suggestions for organizational-level changes and bridging knowledge gaps through designer-centric tools and community building.

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arXiv2026

Putting a Face to the Issue: Fostering User Empathy of Open Source Software Developers With PersonaFlow

Open-source software (OSS) developers often struggle to understand and respond to user context, while existing tools, such as issue trackers (for handling bugs, requests, and feedback), largely focus on technical discussion. Although personas could help, limited resources and UX expertise make them hard to scale. We present PersonaFlow, a tool that generates editable user personas from OSS repository artifacts and integrates them alongside issue reports. In a user study with 13 OSS developers, most reported shifts in how they understood users, and more than half modified their responses by adding empathetic language, tailoring explanations, or raising priority ratings. We found two pathways to this change: some connected emotionally to personas as people, while others used them pragmatically for triaging. Both appeared to lead to more user-centered behavior. We contribute design implications for persona-based tools relevant to OSS and other contexts where efficiency-driven systems or workflows obscure valuable human elements.

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arXiv2026

Choose Your Own Adventure: Non-Linear AI-Assisted Programming with EvoGraph

Current AI-assisted programming tools are predominantly linear and chat-based, which deviates from the iterative and branching nature of programming itself. Our preliminary study with developers using AI assistants suggested that they often struggle to explore alternatives, manage prompting sequences, and trace changes. Informed by these insights, we created EvoGraph, an IDE plugin that integrates AI interactions and code changes as a lightweight and interactive development graph. EvoGraph automatically records a branching AI-assisted coding history and allows developers to manipulate the graph to compare, merge, and revisit prior collaborative AI programming states. Our user study with 20 participants revealed that EvoGraph addressed developers' challenges identified in our preliminary study while imposing lower cognitive load. Participants also found the graph-based representation supported safe exploration, efficient iteration, and reflection on AI-generated changes. Our work highlights design opportunities for tools to help developers make sense of and act on their problem-solving progress in the emerging AI-mediated programming context.

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arXiv2026

Beyond Privacy Labels: How Users Perceive Different Information Sources for Understanding App's Privacy Practices

Despite having growing awareness and concerns about privacy, technology users are often insufficiently informed of the data practices of various digital products to protect themselves. Privacy policies and privacy labels, as two conventional ways of communicating data practices, are each criticized for important limitations -- one being lengthy and filled with legal jargon, and the other oversimplified and inaccurate -- causing users significant difficulty in understanding the privacy practices of the products and assessing their impact. To mitigate those issues, we explore ways to enhance privacy labels with the relevant content in complementary sources, including privacy policy, app reviews, and community-curated privacy assessments. Our user study results indicate that perceived usefulness and trust on those information sources are personal and influenced by past experience. Our work highlights the importance of considering various information needs for privacy practice and consolidating different sources for more useful privacy solutions.

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arXiv2025

"Your Privacy is Your Responsibility": Understanding How Users Collectively Navigate the Complexity of Privacy on Quora

In the current technology environment, users are often in a vulnerable position when it comes to protecting their privacy. Previous efforts to promote privacy protection have largely focused on top-down approaches such as regulation and technology design, missing opportunities to understand how to empower users through bottom-up, collective approaches. Our paper addresses this by analyzing what and how privacy-related topics are discussed on Quora. We identified a wide range of interconnected privacy topics brought up by the users, including privacy risks and dangers, protection strategies, organizational practices, and existing laws and regulations. Our results highlight the interplay among the individual, technological, organizational, and societal factors affecting users' privacy attitudes. Moreover, we provide implications for designing community-based tools to better support users' collective efforts in navigating privacy, tools that incorporate users' diverse privacy-related behaviors and preferences, simplify information access and sharing, and connect designers and developers with the user community.

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arXiv2025

What Pulls the Strings? Understanding the Characteristics and Role of Argumentation in Open-Source Software Usability Discussions

The usability of open-source software (OSS) is important but frequently overlooked in favor of technical and functional complexity. Argumentation can be a pivotal device for diverse stakeholders in OSS usability discussions to express opinions and persuade others. However, the characteristics of argument discourse in those discussions remain unknown, resulting in difficulties in providing effective support for discussion participants. We address this through a comprehensive analysis of argument discourse and quality in five OSS projects. Our results indicated that usability discussions are predominantly argument-driven, although their qualities vary. Issue comments exhibit lower-quality arguments than the issue posts, suggesting a shortage of collective intelligence about usability in OSS communities. Moreover, argument discourse and quality have various impacts on the subsequent behavior of participants. Overall, this research offers insights to help OSS stakeholders build more effective arguments and eventually improve OSS usability. These insights can also inform studies about other distributed collaborative communities.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Democratizing Game Modding with GenAI: A Case Study of StarCharM, a Stardew Valley Character Maker

Game modding offers unique and personalized gaming experiences, but the technical complexity of creating mods often limits participation to skilled users. We envision a future where every player can create personalized mods for their games. To explore this space, we designed StarCharM, a GenAI-based non-player character (NPC) creator for Stardew Valley. Our tool enables players to iteratively create new NPC mods, requiring minimal user input while allowing for fine-grained adjustments through user control. We conducted a user study with ten Stardew Valley players who had varied mod usage experiences to understand the impacts of StarCharM and provide insights into how GenAI tools may reshape modding, particularly in NPC creation. Participants expressed excitement in bringing their character ideas to life, although they noted challenges in generating rich content to fulfill complex visions. While they believed GenAI tools like StarCharM can foster a more diverse modding community, some voiced concerns about diminished originality and community engagement that may come with such technology. Our findings provided implications and guidelines for the future of GenAI-powered modding tools and co-creative modding practices.

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arXiv2025

"Ohhh, He's the Boss!": Unpacking Power Dynamics Among Developers, Designers, and End-Users in FLOSS Usability

Addressing 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, providing 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 during collaboration that are usually hidden in the field.

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arXiv2025

Untold Stories: Unveiling the Scarce Contributions of UX Professionals to Usability Issue Discussions of Open Source Software Projects

Previous work established that open source software (OSS) projects can benefit from the involvement of UX professionals, who offer user-centric perspectives and contributions to improve software usability. However, their participation in OSS issue discussions (places where design and implementation decisions are often made) is relatively scarce since those platforms are created with a developer-centric mindset. Analyzing a dataset sampled from five OSS projects, this study identifies UX professionals' distinct approaches to raising and following up on usability issues. Compared to other contributors, UX professionals addressed a broader range of usability issues, well-supported their stances, and were more factual than emotional. They also actively engage in discussions to provide additional insights and clarifications in comments following up on the issues they posted. Results from this study provide useful insights for increasing UX professionals' involvement in OSS communities to improve usability and end-user satisfaction.

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arXiv2025

Beyond Automation: How UI/UX Designers Perceive AI as a Creative Partner in the Divergent Thinking Stages

Divergent 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.

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arXiv2025

Dancing With Chains: Ideating Under Constraints With UIDEC in UI/UX Design

UI/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.

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arXiv2025

Who is to Blame: A Comprehensive Review of Challenges and Opportunities in Designer-Developer Collaboration

Software 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.

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arXiv2024

Motivating Users to Attend to Privacy: A Theory-Driven Design Study

In 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.

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arXiv2024

"It's Sink or Swim'': Exploring Patients' Challenges and Tool Needs for Self-Management of Postoperative Acute Pain

Poorly 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.

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arXiv2024

Interrogating AI: Characterizing Emergent Playful Interactions with ChatGPT

In 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.

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arXiv2023

Characterizing Usability Issue Discussions in Open Source Software Projects

Usability is a crucial factor but one of the most neglected concerns in open source software (OSS). While far from an ideal approach, a common practice that OSS communities adopt to collaboratively address usability is through discussions on issue tracking systems (ITSs). However, there is little knowledge about the extent to which OSS community members engage in usability issue discussions, the aspects of usability they frequently target, and the characteristics of their collaboration around usability issue discussions. This knowledge is important for providing practical recommendations and research directions to better support OSS communities in addressing this important topic and improve OSS usability in general. To help achieve this goal, we performed an extensive empirical study on issues discussed in five popular OSS applications: three data science notebook projects (Jupyter Lab, Google Colab, and CoCalc) and two code editor projects (VSCode and Atom). Our results indicated that while usability issues are extensively discussed in the OSS projects, their scope tended to be limited to efficiency and aesthetics. Additionally, these issues are more frequently posted by experienced community members and display distinguishable characteristics, such as involving more visual communication and more participants. Our results provide important implications that can inform the OSS practitioners to better engage the community in usability issue discussion and shed light on future research efforts toward collaboration techniques and tools for discussing niche topics in diverse communities, such as the usability issues in the OSS context.

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