The Digital Attention Heuristics: Supporting the User's Attention by Design

The HCI research community has traditionally considered digital wellbeing an end-user responsibility, designing tools for digital self-control that support them to self-regulate their usage of apps and websites. Yet, these attempts are often ineffective in the long term, as many tech companies still adopt "attention-capture" designs that compromise users' sense of agency and self-control. Taking a complementary perspective, this paper presents a set of eight heuristics to create user interfaces that preserve and respect user attention by design. The heuristics stem from a systematic literature review and are grounded in the three fundamental psychological needs defined by the self-determination theory, i.e., autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In addition to being informed by theory and research, each heuristic is accompanied by practical strategies and real-world examples, offering designers actionable guidelines to value people's attention in user interfaces.