Impact of nudges on digital well-being for the smartphone

In the recent past, a lot of research has demonstrated that an increasing amount of people, especially teenagers and young adults, is suffering from technology addiction. This new form of dependence can cause various health problems, starting from lack of sleep or decreased communication, and ending with depression, obesity and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. To keep under control this problem, and possibly overcome it, different solutions have been experimented during the years. The most adopted proposal is represented by Digital Self-Control Tools, that are pieces of software, implemented as smartphone application or web extension, that help people in reducing their technology overuse by adopting interventions like timers, alarms, blocks of incoming notifications and screen-locks. Since DSCTs have been proven to not having stable and long-term effects, the newer concept of nudge has been introduced in the academic literacy. Nudges are alterations of the choice architecture that can affect the choice of users in a predictable way, without forbidding any of the options. Common examples in this context are choice defaults and larger buttons for the preferred option. The main objective of this study is to investigate whether the nudge approach is effective or not, trying to give a response to the following research question: “Are nudges capable of driving the behavior of users while they are using social networks?”. For reaching this goal, this thesis has been divided in three main steps. In the first one, six participants have been invited to a collaborative codesign session with the aim of designing the interface. Analyzing the results of this step, it has been possible to define both the list of social networks to be monitored by the interface, i.e., Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and the types of intervention to be shown to user, i.e., a widget telling users whether they are scrolling fast or refreshing the page often, and a screen displayed before entering one of the targeted apps that informs about the mechanisms used in it to keep users online. In the final step, after the Android application has been developed following the design details previously specified, about twenty users have experimented the interface during a two-week long study. By collecting the results of the user experiment, it has been possible to answer to the above-mentioned research question and, thus, to draw conclusions on the effectiveness of the nudging approach on the behavior of users while they are using social networks.