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My current research interests are on topics related to Personal Informatics and Social Computing. More specifically, I focus on designing positive social sharing experience for users of personal tracking technology.
In the past, I have worked on research projects to study and design positive social interaction in different contexts. For example, how interaction between streamers and viewers in livestreaming were influence by monetary-based incentives (digital gifts), and how social affordance of games could potentially engage parents and their preschoolers in fine motor skills training.
CSCW 2022 | Paper
Sharing personal informatics data can support accountability, connectedness, and self-expression, but people often find their data too trivial to share on social media. Ephemeral social platforms like Snapchat and Story features have emerged as spaces for sharing more trivial life events, presenting an opportunity to incorporate self-tracked data into sharing. Past work suggests that including data-driven stickers on these platforms can help add additional context to what people share, but little is known about the benefits and challenges of people's everyday experiences with this concept. To understand people's everyday use of data-driven stickers, we designed and developed SnapPI, an app for flexibly incorporating data into stickers for Snapchat. We deployed SnapPI to 21 participants for two weeks, finding that participants value aligning data sharing with Snapchat's communication and stylistic norms. Perceiving Snapchat as a playful platform, participants connected data stickers with various visual components of their Snaps. Stickers were used to incorporate personal informatics data into their existing conversations, and were edited to align with different audience needs or to be expressive. We discuss recommendations for personal data sharing, suggesting supporting flexibility in presentation and aligning with the norms of existing platforms.Dennis Wang, Marawin Chheang, Siyun Ji, Ryan Mohta, and Daniel A. Epstein. 2022. SnapPI: Understanding Everyday Use of Personal Informatics Data Stickers on Ephemeral Social Media. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2, Article 539 (November 2022), 27 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555652
CSCW 2019 | Paper
Live streaming is an emergent social medium that allows remote interaction between the streamer and an audience of any size. Major live-streaming platforms in some Asian countries have a digital gift-giving feature that allows viewers to directly reward streamers during live sessions. Streamers can later exchange the digital gifts they have received for money, and this monetary incentive appears likely to influence how they interact with their viewers and generate live-streaming content. However, the precise nature and mechanisms of such impact have not previously been explored. Therefore, this qualitative study with 13 streamer participants examines how digital gifting influences streamers' motivations and the nature of both the content that they generate and their social interactions with their audiences. It reports that the digital-gifting function serves as a major incentive for active streaming, but may also disincentivize some streamers from continuing to contribute, for reasons that will be explored. Moreover, the participants devised strategies for both content generation and social interaction with the specific objective of earning gifts from viewers: practices that, in some cases, appeared to limit the quality of their live-streaming content. It was also noted that the streamers tended to have constrained social relationships with their viewers, in part because such relationships were seen as unequal or one-sided due to gift-giving behavior. The paper concludes with a discussion of design considerations for the incorporation of gift-giving features into live-streaming platforms, and additional recommendations for future research and the design of such platforms.Dennis Wang*, Yi-Chieh Lee*, and Wai-Tat Fu. 2019. "I Love the Feeling of Being on Stage, but I Become Greedy": Exploring the Impact of Monetary Incentives on Live Streamers' Social Interactions and Streaming Content. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW, Article 92 (November 2019), 24 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3359194
MobileHCI 2019 | Paper
Digital gifting in live streaming, in which viewers buy digital gifts to reward the streamers, was worth over $200 million in 2018 in China and its growth has been accelerating. This paper explores what motivates people to tip and how it impacts interactions between viewers and streamers. Through a survey, we identified the main categories of viewers' tipping motivations. We found that viewers were motivated by the reciprocal acts of streamers, who would engage in various types of social interactions with tippers during the live streams. The styles of interactions and contents of live stream based on the tipping are differently influenced by the motivations of viewers and streamers. For example, viewers often tip large to attract attentions from the crowd or promote preferred live-streaming content. These findings provide more knowledge on the social interaction in live streaming platforms.Yi-Chieh Lee, Chi-Hsien Yen, Dennis Wang, and Wai-Tat Fu. 2019. Understanding How Digital Gifting Influences Social Interaction on Live Streams. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 33, 1–10. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3338286.3340144
CHI Extended Abstract 2016 | Paper
Children with developmental delayed can make progress through early intervention and training. However, from the interviews with occupational therapists and parents, we found that current training techniques lack variety and bore children in a short while. To improve the training effect, we proposed PinchFun, a cooperative game aiming to provide fine motor training for preschool children (under 6 years old) with developmental delay, in which the parent can cooperate with the child to achieve the game goals and adjust the game difficulty to meet different developmental milestones. The game employs the Leap motion controller and force-sensitive resistor (FSR) to detect the hand gesture and level of pressure of fingers. PinchFun integrates the physical assistive devices, i.e. clips and rubber band, and the virtual interactive game to optimize learning impact and gaming experience.I-Fang Wang, Dennis Wang, Chia-Yu Chen, and Jyun-Fong Jheng. 2016. PinchFun: A Fine Motor Training Game for Preschool Children with Developmental Delay. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 152–155. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2890371