Nudging Users Towards Conscious Social Media Use

Social networks, especially on mobile interfaces, can potentially undermine users' digital wellbeing promoting passive and excessive use. Previous attempts to support users' self-control either focus on restricting use, e.g., through usage timers and blockers, or removing functionality, e.g., by hiding recommendations. In an attempt to avoid these generic and drastic methods, this paper builds on the idea of using nudging mechanisms to make users recognize those design patterns in a social network app that are deliberately adopted to capture attention, the so-called Attention-Capture Damaging Patterns (ACDPs). Being engineered to make users lose their sense of time and control, we hypothesize that making them visible can trigger conscious decisions and more meaningful usage sessions. Thanks to a co-design study with six mobile users, we designed two nudges for two different ACDPs commonly used on mobile social networks - infinite scroll and pull-to-refresh. Then, we implemented the two nudges in a mobile app, asking 17 users to try them in a 2-week exploratory study. Results show that the implemented nudges made participants feel more in control of their social media use and partially impacted their quantitative smartphone behaviors. Overall, our work points to exploring alternative - less intrusive - nudging methods to support users in self-regulating their smartphone use.