What is it about?
ComViewer is an interactive visual tool that aids viewers in navigating and making sense of posts and comments to seek needed social support in online mental health communities. Our within-subjects study with 20 participants demonstrates the effectiveness of ComViewer in improving support-seeking outcomes and experience compared to a baseline community interface without our proposed three panels in ComViewer.
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Why is it important?
We identify challenges and needs of viewers when seeking social support from online communties. We provide visual information-seeking assistance for viewers with mental health concerns. We offer insights into facilitating information seeking and sense making in online communities with visualization techniques and large language models.
Perspectives
This paper represents an important exploration in the domain of mental health. As society continues to evolve, issues such as anxiety are becoming increasingly prevalent. The study helps users with mental health concerns (e.g., anxiety) seek social support, emphasizing the importance of designing systems that go beyond solely optimizing the efficiency of information retrieval. I hope that more researchers will pay attention to such user groups and explore alternative designs to support these processes.
Shiwei Wu
Sun Yat-Sen University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ComViewer: An Interactive Visual Tool to Help Viewers Seek Social Support in Online Mental Health Communities, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, May 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3710904.
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