To refresh, domscrolling is defined as: The compulsive habit of spending excessive time online scrolling through negative news or content that causes feelings of sadness, anxiety, or anger, even when it’s disheartening. And my main research question starting this project was: Can ethical and intentional design help decrease peoples doomscrolling habits?
How design promotes doomscrolling
through my secondary research i found that there are three main categories of ways design leads to an increase of doomscrolling.
1: Interface Features that Reduce Friction. For example infinite scroll, autoplay, and constant content availability.
2: Algorithmic Personalization and Content Curation. Algorithms prioritize content that maximizes engagement, often selecting emotionally intense, sensational, or negative material.
3: Persuasive Design and Reward Mechanisms. Notifications, social feedback, rewards, and habit-forming triggers.
My Personal Expriments
Did three personal experiments to try to decrease my own doomscrolling and screentime.
1: No phone in the morning. The one that worked out best for me
2: Time limit on apps. Worked to some extent, but too esy to ignore as is does not feel urgent at the moment. This method is the one that has do anything to do with the actual innterface design, having a notificatio pop up, maybe there is a better way to execute this?
3: 30 min deddicated scroll time. Did not work for me at all.
I did manage to decrease my wn screentime a little bit after a while, but I am not sure wether is is due to the exersises in my experiments or just by doing so much research and becomming more aware of the issue.
Interviews
I held 6 interviews with people between the age of 10 and 70. The most Interesting finds relevant to design were the fact that the most common hook that drives people to start doomscrolling was notifications from news, social media apps an such. Also that the type of content mostly consumed while doomscrolling is short-form videos with autoplay settup.
I also found that 4/6 wanted to reduce their own doomscrolling, so there is a wish and hopefully a maket for trying to solve this problem.
Posible design solutions
I also found three posible solutions designers can follow to decrease doomscrolling:
1: Introducing Design Frictions. For example manual content loading giving natural stopping points instead of infinite scroll
2: Regulating Addictive and Manipulative Design. For example transparency requirements, or restrictions on exploitative design.
3: Alternatives to Algorithmic Platform Designs. For example chronological feeds instead of algorithmic and user-controlled recommendation systems.
Future vision
I find this topic very interesting but I will probably not choose this as my masters topic as i am most interested in product design.
However, one posible outcome I have thought of is to elevate the time limit restricting notifications. This tool had did not work very well for me because it did not seem important or urgent to follow the notifictions nudging as i could easily ingnore it. I think that it would be more effective to impliment some sort of character that you could feel emathy for, or propose the break from screentime as a team effort.
