Designing a social support system for college adjustment and social support

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2017

Abstract

A main characteristic of current social systems is that they are designed to never-endingly captivate the attention of users, but are rarely designed to give support to those that need it. We describe the development process of Buddy, a social support mobile app for college students. We created a message stream algorithmically designed to give more attention to those with low psychological wellbeing, hidden feedback metrics to discourage competition or social comparison, and bots to deliver automatic one-click feedback in the form of virtual hugs. Across two field studies, we found that these small design changes can facilitate different types of behavior and community norms.

Identifier

85029430201 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9781577357889]

Publication Title

Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web and Social Media Icwsm 2017

First Page

688

Last Page

691

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