JaeWon Kim

Social media is central to how young people maintain relationships, develop identity, and access communities, yet dominant platform designs often leave youth feeling disempowered rather than supported. My dissertation argues that youth social media design is shaped by three forms of problem-space misattunement. Conceptual misattunement occurs when the language of “social media” anchors participants to existing platforms’ interaction templates. I address this through a Fictional Inquiry design workshop that frees youth from preconceived notions of social media by having them brainstorm ways to “magically connect with remote wizard friends” rather than ideas for “social media.” Definitional misattunement occurs when researchers define what “better” means on youth’s behalf. I address this through a Discord-based asynchronous community that supports youth-led collective inquiry. Evaluative misattunement occurs when participants are asked to judge static or hypothetical designs. I address this through an ego-anchored, LLM-agent simulation sandbox. Together, these studies develop youth-grounded criteria and design directions for relationally supportive social media.

Through a three-part co-design study involving 19 teens aged 13-18, we identify key barriers to effective boundary regulation on social media, including ambiguous audience expectations, social risks associated with oversharing, and the lack of design affordances that facilitate trust-building. Our findings reveal that while adolescents seek casual, frequent sharing to strengthen relationships, existing platform norms and designs often discourage such interactions, leading to withdrawal. To address these challenges, we introduce trust-enabled privacy as a design framework that recognizes trust, whether building or eroding, as central to boundary regulation. When trust is supported, boundary regulation becomes more adaptive and empowering; when it erodes, users default to self-censorship or withdrawal. We propose concrete design affordances, including guided disclosure, contextual audience segmentation, intentional engagement signaling, and trust-centered norms, to help platforms foster a more dynamic and nuanced privacy experience for teen social media users. By reframing privacy as a trust-driven process rather than a rigid control-based trade-off, this work provides empirical insights and actionable guidelines for designing social media environments that empower teens to manage their online presence while fostering meaningful social connections.

We investigate youth visions for ideal remote social interactions, drawing on co-design interviews with 23 participants (aged 15-24) experienced with 3D gaming environments. Using a Fictional Inquiry (FI) method set in the Harry Potter universe, this research reveals that young people desire social media that functions more like immersive, navigable shared social spaces. Across these interviews, participants identified six key priorities for meaningful social connection over social media: intuitive social navigation, shared collaborative experiences, communal environments fostering close relationships, flexible self-presentation, intentional engagement, and playful social mechanics. We introduce the spatial integrity framework, a set of four interrelated design principles: spatial presence, spatial composition, spatial configuration, and spatial depth. Together, these principles outline how online spaces can be designed to feel more like meaningful environments, spaces where relationships can grow through shared presence, movement, and intentional interaction. Participants also described the FI process itself as meaningful, not only for generating new ideas but for empowering them to imagine and shape the future of social media.

Through co-design interviews (N=19) and a design evaluation survey (N=136) with U.S. teens ages 13-18, we investigated teens’ privacy management on social media. Our study revealed that 28% of teens with public accounts and 15% with private accounts experience "dysfunctional fear," that is, fear that diminishes their quality of life or paralyzes them from taking necessary precautions. These fears fall into three categories: fear of uncontrolled audience reach, fear of online hostility, and fear of personal privacy missteps. While current approaches often emphasize individual vigilance and restrictive measures, our findings show this can paradoxically lead teens to either withdraw from beneficial social interactions or resign themselves to accept privacy violations, viewing them as inevitable. Drawing on teen input, we developed and evaluated ten design prototypes that emphasize empowerment over fear, system-wide explicit emphasis on privacy, clear privacy norms, and flexible controls. Survey results indicate teens perceive these approaches as effectively reducing privacy concerns while preserving social benefits. Our findings suggest that platforms will be more likely to protect teens’ privacy and less likely to manufacture unnecessary fear if they include designs that minimize the impact on other users, have low trade-offs with existing features, require minimal user effort, and function independently of community behavior. Such designs include: 1) alerting users about potentially unintentional personal information disclosure and 2) following up on user reports.

Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the pressures created by social media, such as heightened self-consciousness and the need for extensive self-presentation. In this study, we investigate how BeReal, a social media platform designed to counter some of these pressures, influences adolescents’ self-presentation behaviors. We interviewed 29 users aged 13-18 to understand their experiences with BeReal. We found that BeReal’s design focuses on spontaneous sharing, including randomly timed daily notifications and reciprocal posting, discourages staged posts, encourages careful curation of the audience, and reduces pressure on self-presentation. The space created by BeReal offers benefits such as validating an unfiltered life and reframing social comparison, but its approach to self-presentation is sometimes perceived as limited or unappealing and, at times, even toxic. Drawing on this empirical data, we propose design guidelines for platforms that support authentic self-presentation while fostering reciprocity and expanding beyond spontaneous photo-sharing. These guidelines aim to enable users to portray themselves more comprehensively and accurately, ultimately supporting teens’ developmental needs, particularly in building authentic relationships.