Against Marrying a Stranger Marital Matchmaking Technologies in Saudi Arabia

Websites and applications that match and connect individuals for romantic purposes are commonly used in the Western world. However, there have not been many previous investigations focusing on cultural factors that affect the adoption of similar technologies in religiously conservative non-Western cultures. In this study, we examine the socio-technical and cultural factors that influence the perceptions and use of matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia. We report the methods and findings of interviews with 18 Saudi nationals (nine males and nine females) with diverse demographics and backgrounds. We provide qualitatively generated insights into the major themes reported by our participants related to the common approaches to matchmaking, the current role of technology, and concerns regarding matchmaking technologies in this cultural con-text. We relate these themes to specific implications for designing marital matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia and we outline opportunities for future investigations.Comment: 11 pages, 1 table, DIS 201

Exploring Participatory Design Methods to Engage with Arab Communities

ArabHCI is an initiative inaugurated in CHI17 SIG Meeting that brought together 45+ HCI Arab and non-Arab researchers/practitioners who are conducting/interested in HCI within Arab communities. The goal of this workshop is to start dialogs that leverage our "insider" understanding of HCI research in the Arab context and assert our culture identity in design in order to explore challenges and opportunities for future research. In this workshop, we focus on one of the themes that derived our community discussions in most of the held events. We explore the extent to which participatory approaches in the Arab context are culturally and methodologically challenged. Our goal is to bring researchers/practitioners with success and failure stories while designing with Arab communities to discuss methods, share experiences and learned lessons. We plan to share the results of our discussions and research agenda with the wider CHI community through different social and scholarly channels

What About my Privacy, Habibi? Understanding Privacy Concerns and Perceptions of Users From Different Socioeconomic Groups in the Arab World

This paper contributes an in-depth understanding of privacy concerns and perceptions of Arab users. We report on the first comparison of privacy perceptions among (1) users from high socioeconomic groups in Arab countries (HSA), (2) users from medium to low socioeconomic groups in Arab countries (LSA), and (3) as a baseline, users from high socioeconomic groups in Germany (HSG). Our work is motivated by the fact that most research in privacy focused on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. This excludes a segment of the population whose cultural norms and socioeconomic status influence privacy perception and needs. We report on multiple novel findings and unexpected similarities and differences across the user groups. For example, shoulder surfing is more common across LSA and HSG, and defamation is a major threat in LSA. We discuss the implications of our findings on the design of privacy protection measures for investigated groups

Understanding misinformation on Twitter in the context of controversial issues

Social media is slowly supplementing, or even replacing, traditional media outlets such as television, newspapers, and radio. However, social media presents some drawbacks when it comes to circulating information. These drawbacks include spreading false information, rumors, and fake news. At least three main factors create these drawbacks: The filter bubble effect, misinformation, and information overload. These factors make gathering accurate and credible information online very challenging, which in turn may affect public trust in online information. These issues are even more challenging when the issue under discussion is a controversial topic. In this thesis, four main controversial topics are studied, each of which comes from a different domain. This variation of domains can give a broad view of how misinformation is manifested in social media, and how it is manifested differently in different domains. This thesis aims to understand misinformation in the context of controversial issue discussions. This can be done through understanding how misinformation is manifested in social media as well as by understanding people’s opinions towards these controversial issues. In this thesis, three different aspects of a tweet are studied. These aspects are 1) the user sharing the information, 2) the information source shared, and 3) whether specific linguistic cues can help in assessing the credibility of information on social media. Finally, the web application tool TweetChecker is used to allow online users to have a more in-depth understanding of the discussions about five different controversial health issues. The results and recommendations of this study can be used to build solutions for the problem of trustworthiness of user-generated content on different social media platforms, especially for controversial issues

A value sensitive approach to communicate with users and designers in cross-cultural contexts

PhD ThesisCulture is embodied in many aspects of the identity of an individual. This makes it a critical component of understanding the design of technology for its intended users. Cross-Cultural Design has emerged as an approach to incorporate culture in the design of technology using off-the-shelf cultural studies. However, relatively little work has focused on how to approach culture and how to integrate cultural insights in the design of technologies. Additionally, the design space of this thesis, namely cultural values and how they impact the visibility of women in the digital media, is largely under-explored. The research presented in this thesis investigates how to develop value sensitive methods for conducting and communicating culturally specific research. This thesis presents an investigation on the visibility of Saudi women in the digital media using culturally specific methods. Following the Value Sensitive Design methodology in this context, this thesis describes: how I propose a bottom up approach to define culture, enabling value sensitive methods for user research that informs the design of technology; how I approach the integration of these cultural values in evaluating existing systems and develop an implicit value eliciting method; and how I adopt a Double Ethnography approach to develop effective methods for communicating culturally specific research to a multifunctional team of designers. In response to this context, I introduce two communication methods: Scenario Co-Creation Cards and Research Snippets, addressing these requirements. Scenario Co-Creating Cards are a novel value eliciting method which incorporate the cultural value of the users, while Research Snippets are a research communication method, which help designers to understand culturally specific research. In presenting the findings of a real-world deployment and evaluation of these two methods, this thesis contributes to current discourse in HCI on how to conceptualize cultural research to bridge the communication gap between user researchers and designers. This thesis is inspired by Vision 2030 (National Transformation Plan) in which women are supported to fully participate in all aspects of Saudi society. The past few years have witnessed ground-breaking reforms in Saudi Arabia to improve the rights and mobility of women. A major part of the reform was transforming the public sphere to be more accommodating to women, including their appointment to leadership positions. This thesis aims at understanding how to promote and support the visibility of women within their frames of cultural and individual values. We built this understanding from the voices of transnational Saudi women who have experienced a higher level of visibility. However, by improving our understanding of how to design across cultures, this work should contribute toward Vision 2030, helping to empower and support the visibility of all women across the entire nation.Saudi Cultural Mission through the national scholarship progra

The Role of Professional Identity into Explaining Saudi Arabian Healthcare Professional Resistance to Electronic Health Records’ Stratigic Change in Public Hospitals

Electronic Health Record (EHR) is an application that captures patients’ information and promises to improve healthcare services. Hence, many countries, including the developing country, such as Saudi Arabia, invested heavily to implement the system and improve healthcare service delivery. Yet, the system's adoption is slow, and failure is high, which could be related to healthcare professionals’ resistance to change to the EHR applications. Further, despite the importance of the topic of EHR resistance, little research has been conducted in Saudi Arabia regarding healthcare professionals’ resistance to change to EHR. Motivated thus, this research suggested that resistance to EHR in Saudi Arabia results from cultural and professional identity factors, which guide healthcare professionals’ behaviour. Therefore, this research investigated how the professional identity of Saudi healthcare professionals can explain their resistance tousing EHR applications. The study used identity theory as our main theoretical lens along with Hofstede cultural dimension theory and in-depth qualitative interviews to understand the EHR resistance to change phenomenon. Our study has revealed similarities between Saudi and Western healthcare professionals’ factors that could contribute to EHR resistance. However, interestingly, cultural, and religious norms were also found to be one of the leading causes of Saudi healthcare professionals’ resistance to the EHR change. Our theoretical contributions helped us understand the role of identity in EHR use in a place where professionals with a strong professional and cultural identity are the system's main users. In addition, our practical contributions aimed to help the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia to understand what healthcare professional needs before adapting an EHR system, or improve the current once. Further, it could help hospital managers address, understand, and solve the challenges facing healthcare professionals as they use the EHR system