In the attention economy, video apps employ design mechanisms like autoplay that exploit psychological vulnerabilities to maximize watch time. Consequently, many people feel a lack of agency over their app use, which is linked to negative life effects such as loss of sleep. Prior design research has innovated external mechanisms that police multiple apps, such as lockout timers. In this work, we shift the focus to how the internal mechanisms of an app can support user agency, taking the popular YouTube mobile app as a test case. From a survey of 120 U.S. users, we find that autoplay and recommendations primarily undermine sense of agency, while search and playlists support it. From 13 co-design sessions, we find that when users have a specific intention for how they want to use YouTube they prefer interfaces that support greater agency. We discuss implications for how designers can help users reclaim a sense of agency over their media use. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.

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People are increasingly sharing information on social media during disaster events. This information could be valuable to emergency responders, but there remain challenges for using it to inform response efforts---including filtering relevant information from the large volumes of noise. Previous research has largely focused on identifying information that can contribute to a generalized concept of situational awareness. Our work explores the value of approaching this problem from a different perspective---one of actionablity---with the idea that information relevance may vary across responder role, domain, and other factors. This approach asks how we can get the right information to the right person at the right time? We interviewed and surveyed diverse responders to understand what "actionable" information is, allowing that actionability might differ from one responder to another. Through the findings, we (a) offer a nuanced understanding of actionability and differentiate it from situational awareness; (b) describe responders' perspective of what distinguishes good information when making rapid judgments; and (c) suggest opportunities for augmenting social media use to highlight information that needs immediate attention. We offer researchers an opportunity to frame different models of actionability to suit the requirements of a responding role.

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Adolescent mental health is a growing public health issue, with 30% of teens reporting increased stress and 20% of adolescents suffering from depression. Given the scarcity and lack of scalability of mental health services available, the use of self-administered, evidence-based technologies to support adolescent mental health is both timely and imperative. We conducted a mixed-methods pilot study with 31 adolescents ages 14–19 (m = 17.97) to explore the self-administration of a nature-based virtual reality tool. Participant use of the VR environment ranged from 1 to 10 sessions (m = 6.6) at home over a 2-week period while reporting their daily stress and mood levels. All participants completed all of the study protocols, indicating our protocol was feasible and the VR environment engaging. Post-study interviews indicated that most participants found the VR tool to be relaxing and helpful with stress. The themes of Calm Down, Relaxation, and Escape emerged to articulate the participants’ experiences using the VR environment. Additionally, participants provided rich data regarding their preferences and activity in the VR environment as well as its effect on their emotional states. Although the sample size was insufficient to determine the impact on depression, we found a significant reduction in momentary stress as a result of using the VR tool. These preliminary data inform our own virtual reality environment design, but also provide evidence of the potential for self-administered virtual reality as a promising tool to support adolescent mental health.