Kai Lukoff

Ilona van der Linden, Sahana Kumar, Arnav Dixit et al.

Generative AI tools are increasingly used to create portrayals of people in occupations, raising concerns about how race and gender are represented. We conducted a large-scale audit of over 1.5 million occupational personas across 41 U.S. occupations, generated by four large language models with different AI safety commitments and countries of origin (U.S., China, France). Compared with Bureau of Labor Statistics data, we find two recurring patterns: systematic shifts, where some groups are consistently under- or overrepresented, and stereotype exaggeration, where existing demographic skews are amplified. On average, White (--31pp) and Black (--9pp) workers are underrepresented, while Hispanic (+17pp) and Asian (+12pp) workers are overrepresented. These distortions can be extreme: for example, across all four models, Housekeepers are portrayed as nearly 100\% Hispanic, while Black workers are erased from many occupations. For HCI, these findings show provider choice materially changes who is visible, motivating model-specific audits and accountable design practices.

Kai Lukoff, Ulrik Lyngs, Himanshu Zade et al.

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.

Kai Lukoff, Ulrik Lyngs, Stefania Gueorguieva et al.

Hundreds of popular mobile apps today market their ties to mindfulness. What activities do these apps support and what benefits do they claim? How do mindfulness teachers, as domain experts, view these apps? We first conduct an exploratory review of 370 mindfulness-related apps on Google Play, finding that mindfulness is presented primarily as a tool for relaxation and stress reduction. We then interviewed 15 U.S. mindfulness teachers from the therapeutic, Buddhist, and Yogic traditions about their perspectives on these apps. Teachers expressed concern that apps that introduce mindfulness only as a tool for relaxation neglect its full potential. We draw upon the experiences of these teachers to suggest design implications for linking mindfulness with further contemplative practices like the cultivation of compassion. Our findings speak to the importance of coherence in design: that the metaphors and mechanisms of a technology align with the underlying principles it follows.

Ulrik Lyngs, Kai Lukoff, Petr Slovak et al.

Beyond being the world's largest social network, Facebook is for many also one of its greatest sources of digital distraction. For students, problematic use has been associated with negative effects on academic achievement and general wellbeing. To understand what strategies could help users regain control, we investigated how simple interventions to the Facebook UI affect behaviour and perceived control. We assigned 58 university students to one of three interventions: goal reminders, removed newsfeed, or white background (control). We logged use for 6 weeks, applied interventions in the middle weeks, and administered fortnightly surveys. Both goal reminders and removed newsfeed helped participants stay on task and avoid distraction. However, goal reminders were often annoying, and removing the newsfeed made some fear missing out on information. Our findings point to future interventions such as controls for adjusting types and amount of available information, and flexible blocking which matches individual definitions of 'distraction'.

Ulrik Lyngs, Kai Lukoff, Petr Slovak et al.

Many people struggle to control their use of digital devices. However, our understanding of the design mechanisms that support user self-control remains limited. In this paper, we make two contributions to HCI research in this space: first, we analyse 367 apps and browser extensions from the Google Play, Chrome Web, and Apple App stores to identify common core design features and intervention strategies afforded by current tools for digital self-control. Second, we adapt and apply an integrative dual systems model of self-regulation as a framework for organising and evaluating the design features found. Our analysis aims to help the design of better tools in two ways: (i) by identifying how, through a well-established model of self-regulation, current tools overlap and differ in how they support self-control; and (ii) by using the model to reveal underexplored cognitive mechanisms that could aid the design of new tools.