Personal Informatics Data

CSCW 2025 | Paper
Role: Graduate Research assistant
Duration: June 2023 - January 2024.
Method: Content analysis
Description: A project on understanding how emerging platform design impact the practice of activity sharing to help sharer reach the sharing goals.

Background:
The rise of Short-form Video Sharing

• Short-form video has been widely adopted by social platforms.
• The short, vertical nature, along with the inherent expressiveness of video makes this a canvas for creativity.
• Algorithm-mediated curation of content makes people engaging with their interest with hyper-focus.

Motivation:
Our research goal is to understand how people share activities through short form video. Most social media mainly support sharing through static media, which limits how everyday life is shown. Short form video, with its short length, vertical format, and focused interests, changes how people document personal experiences and feelings. We study this format to better understand everyday sharing in rich media.

Methods:
Content analysis of TikTOk Videos

Findings:

• Norms of Narration as a Common practice
  • Identify the norms of narration as a common practice when people sharing activity in short-form video. People share activity in three phases: preparing for, during, and post-activity.
  • Different strategies are employed within each phase to integrate activity-relevant information.

• Strategies for Narration

  • Preparing for the Activity

    • Strategy: Presentation of Goal
      • People often share goals they have before presenting their activity.
      • Goals are often broken down into sub-goals of different scale.

  • During the Activity

    • Strategy: Progress Stamps
      • Numerical or qualitative representations
are used to show segmented progresses.

    • Strategy: Live Commentary


      • Activity details, such as emotional feelings or goal-achievement plans, are presented.
    • Post-activity
      • Strategy: Conclusive
Numerical Summarization
        • Numerical summary shown in different means at the end of the video.
      • Strategy: Post-activity Reflection
        • Reflections and plans for future activities are presented.

• Benefits and Challenges from Following Narrative Norms

  • Platforms’ design and characteristics influence people’s sharing practices.
    • Expand sharing goal-achievement to prior, during from only after activity.
    • More willing to disclose emotion, which leads to reciprocal emotional support.
    • Requests (e.g., for social support) may get buried due to the overwhelming amount of information.

Design Implications
Providing Design to support Sharing with the Narrative Norm.

• Encouraging Videos to Follow a Narrative Structure.
  • Guidance in structure should be carefully designed to balance between flexibility and being too prescriptive or formulaic.
• Supporting Closer Integration of Video Editing with Activity Tracking Tools.
  • There are opportunities to enable better integration between video editing tools and tracking tools.

Takeaways

• People adopt a phases-based narrative pattern to share their activity, along with strategies for each to incorporate activity-relevant information.
• While the adopted practices helps realizing certain sharing goals, there are also challenges that the adopted practices may lead to.
  • Inherent challenges of the format needs to be supported,
such as emotional disclosure and overwhelming amount of information.

Acknowledgment: The content draws on materials from Dennis Wang (lead author). Many thanks!