Redesign and Nudging Strategies for Digital Wellbeing on YouTube

In the contemporary attention economy, tech companies adopt design patterns, e.g., content autoplay and infinite scroll, that exploit people’ psychological vulnerabilities and manipulate users into spending time and attention on digital services. These “attention-capture damaging patterns” (ACDPs) often lead people to experience a lost sense of control and time over technology use and a later sense of regret. As a result, concerns about technology overuse and addiction have gained momentum, and researchers, public media, and some tech industries have started highlighting the need to design digital services that better align with people’s digital wellbeing. This thesis aims to develop and evaluate mitigation strategies and alternative design patterns for ACDPs that might positively impact people’s digital wellbeing, rather than diminishing it. Specifically, the work is focused on the browser version of YouTube, targeting some ACDPs characterizing the aforementioned video streaming platform. Specifically, four steps have been followed. First, an initial literature review on the digital wellbeing topic was conducted, with a particular focus on ACDPs. Next, a set of mitigation strategies and alternative design pattern were designed to overcome the limits and drawbacks of three ACDPs found on YouTube, i.e., Infinite Scroll, Neverending Autoplay, and Disguised Ads and Recommendations. The mitigation strategies employed are nudges, e.g., highlighting when the user is scrolling infinitely by progressively changing the background color, or marking an ad with a with a colored border to distinguish it from other content. An example of alternative design patterns are redesigns, e.g., additional features altering the usual behavior of an existing interface. The designed set of mitigation strategies and alternative design patterns were then integrated in the YouTube web interface, through the implementation of a Google Chrome extension called TubeWizard. At last, the effectiveness of the implemented artifacts was evaluated through a twelve-day study involving 14 participants. This evaluation aimed to compare the impact of redesign and nudging strategies, and the findings revealed that both tactics encouraged intentional and mindful use of the platform.