Mingrui Ray. Zhang
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States
Existing designs helping people manage their social media use include: 1) external supports that monitor and limit use; 2) internal supports that change the interface itself. Here, we design and deploy Chirp, a mobile Twitter client, to independently examine how users experience external and internal supports. To develop Chirp, we identified 16 features that influence users’ sense of agency on Twitter through a survey of 129 participants and a design workshop. We then conducted a four-week within-subjects deployment with 31 participants. Our internal supports (including features to filter tweets and inform users when they have exhausted new content) significantly increased users’ sense of agency, while our external supports (a usage dashboard and nudges to close the app) did not. Participants valued our internal supports and said that our external supports were for "other people". Our findings suggest that design patterns promoting agency may serve users better than screen time tools.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517722
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)