About

Amanda Baughan is a PhD candidate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, specializing in human-computer interaction. She combines user-centered design and computational social science methods with theory from a variety of social science disciplines to design, implement, and evaluate the impact of digital interventions – both novel and existing – on users’ relationships and mental well-being.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• World Wide Web
• Internet privacy
• Political Science
• Chemistry
• Human–computer interaction
• Epistemology
• Public relations
• Data science

Selected publications

• Understanding Children's Avatar Making in Social Online Games

  ArXiv.org · 2025-02-25

  preprintOpen access

  Social online games like Minecraft and Roblox have become increasingly integral to children's daily lives. Our study explores how children aged 8 to 13 create and customize avatars in these virtual environments. Through semi-structured interviews and gameplay observations with 48 participants, we investigate the motivations behind children's avatar-making. Our findings show that children's avatar creation is motivated by self-representation, experimenting with alter ego identities, fulfilling social needs, and improving in-game performance. In addition, designed monetization strategies play a role in shaping children's avatars. We identify the ''wardrobe effect,'' where children create multiple avatars but typically use only one favorite consistently. We discuss the impact of cultural consumerism and how social games can support children's identity exploration while balancing self-expression and social conformity. This work contributes to understanding how avatar shapes children's identity growth in social online games.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding Children's Avatar Making in Social Online Games

  2025-04-24 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Supporting Hard Conversations in Close Relationships Through Design

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2024-11-07 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Relationships are perhaps the single greatest source of human happiness, and as part of building strong relationships, conflict and hard conversations are unavoidable. As people increasingly rely on digital communication to initiate and resolve conflicts, we examine how design can improve the experience of working through hard conversations within close relationships. We interviewed six psychotherapists and twenty-one social media users to understand both theoretical best practices for navigating conflict and users' experiences with hard conversations online, particularly on text-based messaging platforms. We used our findings to create a temporal model of how digital design could intervene to support users and their relationships during these conversations. Specifically, we find that design can help to facilitate more mutually consensual difficult conversations, support emotional regulation during the conversation, and help facilitate pauses when necessary. We explore the tensions between balancing the needs of relationships and the individuals in them in digital design, and how to center relationships in digital design.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Investigating Attention and Normative Dissociation in Children's Social Video Games

  2024-06-14 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Children’s video games are controversial for their deeply engrossing nature. We conducted an interview and observational study with 17 eight-to-thirteen-year-olds to examine how they deploy their attention while gaming. In sessions of 60-75 minutes, a research assistant toured either Roblox or Minecraft, following the lead of a child participant. We analyzed a segment of these interviews to understand participants’ patterns of normative dissociation—experiences of complete cognitive absorption that exclude processing of the environment beyond the focus of attention. Our analysis revealed that many of our participants had experiences that fit the model of normative dissociation. Participants reported becoming deeply absorbed in games to the point of losing track of time and not paying attention to their surroundings. Game design influenced children’s patterns of normative dissociation, and in particular, user-paced traveling through the game environment and game-initiated pauses allowed children to more easily attend to stimuli outside the game. We recommend parental controls leverage these points of game play to collaboratively support children’s time management during gameplay.

  PublisherDOI

• The Attuned Self Online: Designing for Connection

  ResearchWorks at the University of Washington (University of Washington) · 2024-01-01

  dissertationOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2024

  Publisher

• Attached to “The Algorithm”: Making Sense of Algorithmic Precarity on Instagram

  2023-04-19 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access

  This work explores how users navigate the opaque and ever-changing algorithmic processes that dictate visibility on Instagram through the lens of Attachment Theory. We conducted thematic analysis on 1,100 posts and comments on r/Instagram to understand how users engage in collective sensemaking with regards to Instagram’s algorithms, user-perceived punishments, and strategies to counteract algorithmic precarity. We found that the unpredictability in how Instagram rewards or punishes a user can lead to distress, hypervigilance, and a need to appease “the algorithm’’. We therefore frame these findings through Attachment Theory, drawing upon the metaphor of Instagram as an unreliable paternalistic figure that inconsistently rewards users [74]. User experiences are then contextualized through the lens of anxious, avoidant, disorganized, and secure attachment. We conclude by making suggestions for fostering secure attachment towards the Instagram algorithm, by suggesting potential strategies to help users successfully cope with uncertainty.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tak hanya adab buruk: mengapa media sosial membuat perdebatan konstruktif sulit terjadi di ruang maya

  2023-01-11

  preprint1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Mixed-Methods Approach to Understanding User Trust after Voice Assistant Failures

  2023-04-19 · 26 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Despite huge gains in performance in natural language understanding via large language models in recent years, voice assistants still often fail to meet user expectations. In this study, we conducted a mixed-methods analysis of how voice assistant failures affect users’ trust in their voice assistants. To illustrate how users have experienced these failures, we contribute a crowdsourced dataset of 199 voice assistant failures, categorized across 12 failure sources. Relying on interview and survey data, we find that certain failures, such as those due to overcapturing users’ input, derail user trust more than others. We additionally examine how failures impact users’ willingness to rely on voice assistants for future tasks. Users often stop using their voice assistants for specific tasks that result in failures for a short period of time before resuming similar usage. We demonstrate the importance of low stakes tasks, such as playing music, towards building trust after failures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Shame on Who? Experimentally Reducing Shame During Political Arguments on Twitter

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2022-11-07 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Online political arguments have a reputation for being futile exchanges, partially because people often respond more punitively to those who do not share their views, a phenomenon called ingroup bias. We explore how ingroup bias affects political disagreements online, and how respect can mitigate its effects. Towards this goal, we conducted an experiment on Twitter systematically varying respectful versus neutral disagreement language across people who did and did not share views. We found that people who do not share views were most likely to reply to disagreements, and neutral disagreements generated more discussions than respectful disagreements. However, we also found that using respectful language increased respectful language received in return, and it reduced the effects of ingroup bias across conversations with people who do and do not share the same views. We conclude with recommendations to promote respectful language on social media and build shame resiliency online, such as designs that encourages thoughtful engagement and a peer support network that allows users to share shame experiences online.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Monitoring Screen Time or Redesigning It?

  CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 2022 · 39 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Human–computer interaction

  Existing designs helping people manage their social media use include: 1) external supports that monitor and limit use; 2) internal supports that change the interface itself. Here, we design and deploy Chirp, a mobile Twitter client, to independently examine how users experience external and internal supports. To develop Chirp, we identified 16 features that influence users’ sense of agency on Twitter through a survey of 129 participants and a design workshop. We then conducted a four-week within-subjects deployment with 31 participants. Our internal supports (including features to filter tweets and inform users when they have exhausted new content) significantly increased users’ sense of agency, while our external supports (a usage dashboard and nudges to close the app) did not. Participants valued our internal supports and said that our external supports were for “other people.” Our findings suggest that design patterns promoting agency may serve users better than screen time tools.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alexis Hiniker

  7 shared

• Paul Resnick

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  2 shared

• Ashwin Rajadesingan

  2 shared

• Katharina Reinecke

  2 shared

• Jenny Radesky

  Michigan United

  2 shared

• Dania Alsabeh

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  2 shared

• E.A. Riskin

  University of Washington

  2 shared

• Naomi Yamashita

  2 shared

Education

• B.A., Computer Science, Economics

  University of Miami

  2016

• M.S., Computer Science & Engineering

  University of Washington

  2020

• Ph.D., Computer Science & Engineering

  University of Washington

  2024