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You're the Voice: Evaluating User Interfaces for Encouraging Underserved Youths to express themselves through Creative Writing

Published: 22 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Minority groups are the fastest growing demographic in the U.S. In addition, the poverty level in the U.S. is the highest it has been in the last 50 years. We argue that the community needs more research addressing this user segment, and we present a novel study about how underserved youths react when presented with different UI designs aimed at promoting creative writing. The act of creative writing per se can become the driver of change among underserved teenagers, and researchers should strive to discover novel UI designs that can effectively increase this target group's productivity, creativity and mental well-being. Using MS Word as baseline, our contribution analyzes the influence of a Zen-like tool (designed by the authors and called Haven), a nostalgic but realistic typewriting tool (Hanx Writer), and a stress-based tool that eliminates writer's block by providing consequences for procrastination (Write or Die). Our results suggest that the Zen characteristics of our tool Haven were capable of conveying a sense of calm and concentration to the users, making them feel better and also write more. The nostalgic Hanx typewriter also fared very well with regard to mental well-being and productivity, as measured by average number of words written. Contrary to our initial expectations, the stress-based UI (Write or Die) had the lowest productivity levels.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    C&C '15: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition
    June 2015
    420 pages
    ISBN:9781450335980
    DOI:10.1145/2757226
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 22 June 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. civic media.
    2. creative writing
    3. creativity support tools
    4. user experience design
    5. user studies

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    C&C '15
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    C&C '15: Creativity and Cognition
    June 22 - 25, 2015
    Glasgow, United Kingdom

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    C&C '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 23 of 88 submissions, 26%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 108 of 371 submissions, 29%

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing AssistantsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642697(1-35)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2023)Engaging the Discourse of Empowerment for Marginalized Communities Through Research and Design ParticipationExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3585678(1-7)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2022)From Tool to Companion: Storywriters Want AI Writers to Respect Their Personal Values and Writing StrategiesProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533506(1209-1227)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
    • (2022)Creating Stories of Learning, for Learning: Exploring the Potential of Self-Narrative in Education with ‘Our Journey’Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Creativity and Cognition10.1145/3527927.3535208(526-531)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2022
    • (2019)A Review of Research on Participation in Democratic Decision-Making Presented at SIGCHI Conferences. Toward an Improved Trading Zone Between Political Science and HCIProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33592413:CSCW(1-29)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2019
    • (2019)Digitally Augmenting the Physical Ground Space with Timed Visual Cues for Crutch-Assisted WalkingExtended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290607.3312891(1-6)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
    • (2019)Enhancing Your Mental Well-Being and Creativity While Writing: A Crowdsource-Based ApproachHuman Work Interaction Design. Designing Engaging Automation10.1007/978-3-030-05297-3_2(17-35)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019
    • (2018)Sense.SeatAdjunct Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3266037.3266105(72-74)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
    • (2017)What Shall I Write Next?Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics10.1145/3121283.3121294(77-84)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2017
    • (2017)Sharing the Housebound Experience through Visual StorytellingProceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition10.1145/3059454.3059487(2-14)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2017
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