Paper Session 3: Digital Social Life
Date: Monday 2 Nov 2026
Time: 16:00–16:40
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| Time | Presentation | Abstract | Authors | Contribution type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16:00-16:10 | Children and Their Digital Monies: Expert Perspectives and HCI Opportunities | Children and young people grow up today in a digital economy. They will experience a vast array of digital forms and representations of money, from gift cards and pocket money apps to in-game purchases and cryptocurrencies. Recent child-centred research in HCI has begun to address this shift; in this study we extend this by gathering expert perspectives through an interview study with 12 diverse experts, to consider children’s financial experiences more holistically. In so doing, we identify: A) key qualities of digital monies that impact children’s lives; B) the primary benefits, challenges and harms they face with digital financial systems and C) the specific opportunities for the HCI community to address these challenges through research and design. | McKinley, Andries, Lechelt, Elsden | Paper |
| 16:10-16:20 | Conversational Interfaces Reshape What People Ask of Place | Conversational interfaces are displacing the search bar, but a chatbot is not a neutral conduit: what a system appears able to do shapes what users ask of it. We test this for queries with geospatial intent, which constitute a persistent share of information-seeking behaviour. We apply query log analysis to 423,142 first turns from three public chatbot corpora (WildChat, ShareChat, LMSYS-Chat-1M), using the same classifier and clustering pipeline as a prior 1M-query web-search taxonomy, and restricting analysis to short first turns so any difference is a conservative lower bound. We find that the factual-lookup core persists: people still ask chatbots for capitals, distances, and boundaries. But the largest conversational geospatial behaviour is one a search bar cannot support: users ask the system to compose place-grounded text rather than retrieve or evaluate place-facts, and treat the chatbot as a trip planner with complex constraints. Current geospatial benchmarks, weighted towards factual recall, are not equipped to evaluate this behaviour. We release our code and taxonomy for reproducibility. | Ilyankou, Cavazzi, Haworth | Paper |
| 16:20-16:30 | Deaf Play: Social Play and Signed Communication among Deaf Gamers in Co-Located Environments | Co-located multiplayer gaming experiences feature continuous, low-effort verbal communication, creating hidden barriers for Sign Language Users. Prior work on mixed hearing-deaf groups documents multimodal communication strategies; combining spoken communication, non-sign gesturing, and text-based chat systems. This leaves a gap in our understanding of how communication occurs in non-spoken contexts, where text-based modalities are impractical such as for groups composed of only sign language users in co-located environments. Without understanding these contexts, designers risk excluding d/DHH players from social experiences in games. We present an observational study of primary sign language users to show how two interacting constraints, manual encumbrance on the hands from having to hold the controllers, and competing visual attention between players and on-screen play, affect Deaf communication in a co-located gaming environment. We introduce a model describing how Deaf players negotiate attention, encumbrance, and communication timing during co-located play. | Curtis, Gould, Finnegan | Paper |
| 16:30-16:40 | Older Adults Navigating Trust, Safety, and Privacy in Online Dating | Older adults are increasingly using online dating, but this comes with safety and privacy risks. To understand how they manage these challenges, we interviewed 31 adults aged 60-85. Our thematic analysis identified four main themes representing stages of online dating: deciding to date online, creating a profile, evaluating profiles, and deepening a connection. Participants were aware of risks, adapted their approaches, and viewed trust as fragile and something to be earned over time. They also faced frustrations with platform issues such as the prevalence of fraudulent or inactive accounts and the difficulty of deleting profiles. We compare their experiences to the literature on younger adults and highlight ways to better support older online daters. | Marmorato, Stobert | Paper |