While recent advances in HCI and generative AI have improved authors' access to feedback on their work, the abundance of critiques can overwhelm writers and obscure actionable insights. We introduce Synthia, a system that visually scaffolds feedback-based writing revision with LLM-powered synthesis. Synthia helps authors strategize their revisions by breaking down large feedback collections into interactive visual bubbles that can be clustered, colored, and resized to reveal patterns and highlight valuable suggestions. Bidirectional highlighting links each feedback unit to its original context and relevant parts of the text. Writers can selectively combine feedback units to generate alternative drafts, enabling rapid, parallel exploration of revision possibilities. These interactions support feedback curation, interpretation, and experimentation throughout the revision process. A within-subjects study (N=12) showed that Synthia helped participants identify more helpful feedback, explore more diverse revisions, and revise with greater intentionality and transparency than a GPT-4-based writing interface.

This paper introduces Friction, a novel interface designed to scaffold novice writers in reflective feedback-driven revisions. Effective revision requires mindful reflection upon feedback, but the scale and variability of feedback can make it challenging for novice writers to decipher it into actionable, meaningful changes. Friction leverages large language models to break down large feedback collections into manageable units, visualizes their distribution across sentences and issues through a co-located heatmap, and guides users through structured reflection and revision with adaptive hints and real-time evaluation. Our user study (N=16) showed that Friction helped users allocate more time to reflective planning, attend to more critical issues, develop more actionable and satisfactory revision plans, iterate more frequently, and ultimately produce higher-quality revisions, compared to the baseline system. These findings highlight the potential of human-AI collaboration to foster a balanced approach between maximum efficiency and deliberate reflection, supporting the development of creative mastery.

The study of UX dark patterns, i.e., UI designs that seek to manipulate user behaviors, often for the benefit of online services, has drawn significant attention in the CHI and CSCW communities in recent years. To complement previous studies in addressing dark patterns from (1) the designer's perspective on education and advocacy for ethical designs; and (2) the policymaker's perspective on new regulations, we propose an end-user-empowerment intervention approach that helps users (1) raise the awareness of dark patterns and understand their underlying design intents; (2) take actions to counter the effects of dark patterns using a web augmentation approach. Through a two-phase co-design study, including 5 co-design workshops (N=12) and a 2-week technology probe study (N=15), we reported findings on the understanding of users' needs, preferences, and challenges in handling dark patterns and investigated the feedback and reactions to users' awareness of and action on dark patterns being empowered in a realistic in-situ setting.

Mathematical language is a cornerstone of a child's mathematical development, and children can effectively acquire this language through storytelling with a knowledgeable and engaging partner. In this study, we leverage the recent advances in large language models to conduct free-form, creative conversations with children. Consequently, we developed Mathemyths, a joint storytelling agent that takes turns co-creating stories with children while integrating mathematical terms into the evolving narrative. This paper details our development process, illustrating how prompt-engineering can optimize LLMs for educational contexts. Through a user study involving 35 children aged 4-8 years, our results suggest that when children interacted with Mathemyths, their learning of mathematical language was comparable to those who co-created stories with a human partner. However, we observed differences in how children engaged with co-creation partners of different natures. Overall, we believe that LLM applications, like Mathemyths, offer children a unique conversational experience pertaining to focused learning objectives.

Visual storytelling is a new approach to creative expression based on verbal and figural creativity. The keys to visual storytelling are narrating and drawing over a period of time, which can be beneficial but also demanding on creativity for children. Informed by need-finding investigations, we developed StoryDrawer, a co-creative system that supports visual storytelling for children aged 6-10 years through collaborative drawing between children and artificial intelligence (AI). The system includes a context-based voice agent and two AI-driven collaborative strategies: the real-time transformation of children's telling into drawings, and the generation of abstract sketches with semantic similarity to existing story content. We conducted a 2 x 2 study with 64 children to evaluate the efficacy of StoryDrawer by varying the two strategies in four conditions. The results suggest that StoryDrawer provoked participants' creative and elaborate ideas and contributed to their creative outcomes during an engaging visual storytelling experience.