2 posts tagged with "digital wellbeing"

The last few years have seen the flourishing of Digital Self-Control Tools (DSCTs) both in academia and as off-the-shelf products. These tools allow users to self-regulate their technology use. The two screenshots, for example, are taken from Apple Screen Time, an app available on every iOS smartphone. It allows users to monitor time spent and smartphone pickups, with the possibility of defining interventions like usage timers and lock-out mechanisms for specific applications.

While these emerging technologies for behavior change hold great promise to support people’s digital wellbeing, we still have a limited understanding of their real effectiveness, as well as of how to best design and evaluate them.

To close these gaps, we conducted a systematic literature review and a meta-analysis of current work on tools for digital self-control. Our analysis was published on the ACM Trasactions on Computer-Human Interaction, and surfaced motivations, strategies, design choices, and challenges that characterize the design, development, and evaluation of DSCTs.

On April 26, 2023, Alberto presented the paper "Defining and Identifying Attention Capture Damaging Patterns in Digital Interfaces" in the "Digital Wellbeing" session at ACM CHI 2023, the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. The paper is a collaboration between the e-Lite group and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Santa Clara University, CA (USA).

Our work is motivated by the growing public discussion and research attention on the negative aspects of overusing technology. We all know that digital services like social media and video games often capture us, even against our will. In the paper, we investigated how these digital services can capture our attention so much and, in particular, if this attention-capture can be created by design.