This paper reports on a user experience (UX) study investigating how college students navigate university-sponsored online systems for sharing chosen name and pronouns. While the opportunity to share gender identity ostensibly enables inclusive and usable systems for queer students, the visibility of gender nonconformity also imposes surveillance concerns, as pronouns have become an organizing tool for governments and university boards intent on limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Drawing from trans and queer scholarship, this article suggests that the concept of visibility should be closely scrutinized in design settings where heightened visibility can present risks to bodily autonomy or safety.

This article proposes resistance as a form of participation in user experience settings. It details a study to include people living with HIV in codesigning a health education technology, and it found that participants resisted online education initiatives, citing HIV stigma on social media and privacy concerns. Taken with queer theory, these findings underscore the offline inequities mediating interaction on social media for those living with HIV and open alternative design arrangements reflecting participants’ embodied experiences.

Using narrative-based user experience methods, this article investigates how youth living with HIV discuss their serostatus on the dating app Grindr. This study found that participants resisted Grindr’s interface, which encourages users to disclose their HIV status. Using intersectional queer theories of unruliness, this article argues that these resistant user experiences destabilize the underlying ideological aims of Grindr’s risk-reduction strategies, revealing ulterior practices of risk and safety stemming from the embodied realities of living with HIV.