Blending into everyday life: designing a social media-based peer support system

Daniel Lambton-Howard, Emma Simpson, Kim Quimby, Ahmed Kharrufa, Heidi Hoi Ming Ng, Emma Foster, Patrick Olivier

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference PaperResearchpeer-review

16 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Peer support through social media has been shown to have signifcant potential to improve health care outcomes. Despite this, very little is understood about how to design a social media-based peer support system. We use the model of unplatformed design to structure a multi-phase design process of a WhatsApp-based peer support system, with and for participants undergoing extreme weight loss as part of a health care intervention into diabetes management. From a mixed-methods evaluation of a three-month deployment of the system and refections upon the design process we explore the value of the model in facilitating the expression of authentic peer support, and identify how the unique characteristics of unplatformed design allowed for the creation of a peer support system that was responsive to participants' existing everyday use of social media technologies.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCHI'21 - Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
EditorsPernille Bjorn, Steven Drucker
Place of PublicationNew York NY USA
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450380966
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2021
EventInternational Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2021 - Online, Yokohama, Japan
Duration: 8 May 202113 May 2021
Conference number: 39th
https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3411763 (Proceedings)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3411764 (Proceedings)

Conference

ConferenceInternational Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2021
Abbreviated titleCHI 2021
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityYokohama
Period8/05/2113/05/21
Internet address

Keywords

  • Design of peer support
  • Social media
  • Unplatformed design

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