Hello, I'm Kai Lukoff, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington. Today
I'm presenting our research on how the design of YouTube influences user sense
of agency.
For smartphone apps, a common business model is to capture and resell
attention. This leads designers to design features that capture as much of
that attention as possible.
In everyday life, people attempt to resist all kinds of temptations, such as
smoking, drinking and spending money. However, the temptation with the highest
rate of failure of all is media use, which today increasingly happens in
mobile apps.
And of course, this high failure rate is not an accident when those mobile apps
are designed to capture as much attention as possible.
Concerned design practitioners and researchers have responded from within
what we call the screentime paradigm. In this paradigm, the objective is to limit
the time that users spend on their phone. However, users report that these
tools often indiscriminately block access to needed features, and that
reducing screen time is a poor proxy for their actual goals.
In this research, we instead explore how to support the user sense of agency;
that is an individual's experience of being the initiator of their actions in
the world. A lack of agency over technology use is linked to negative
life impacts, such as a loss of productivity, sleep, and social
relationships.
A second characteristic of the screentime paradigm is that it relies
upon external features that apply universally to all apps. In this
research, we instead shift the focus to redesigning the internal features that
might cause an app to be problematic in the first place.
As a test case, for this approach, we focus on YouTube, one of the most
popular social media apps in the world.
Our first research question asks, which existing features of the YouTube mobile
app influence sense of agency? To investigate this question, we conducted
a survey with 120 YouTube users from the US.
Our survey asked what are three things about the mobile app that lead you to
feel least and most in control over how you spend your time on YouTube? This
divergent bar chart shows the results.
They are ordered according to which design feature was mentioned the most
frequently by respondents. The features that primarily lead participants to feel
*least* in control were recommendations, ads, and autoplay. The features that
primarily lead participants to feel *most* in control where playlists,
search, subscriptions, watch history and play controls.
Let's look at one example. survey participants reported that playlists led
them to feel more in control. One participant wrote: I can create
playlists or cue videos and advance to limit what I watch to a specific list
instead of endlessly searching around for what I want. So as compared to
searching around or browsing recommendations, playlists had a clear
end that served as a signal for them to finish their session on YouTube.
Our second research question asks, What changes to these internal features might
increase sense of agency? We were particularly interested in understanding
how to change features that the survey participants said sometimes made them
feel more in control, and sometimes made them feel less in control.
To investigate this question, we conducted co design sessions with 13
General users of the YouTube mobile app. This included an exercise in which
participants sketched and explained what changes would give them greater control.
Participants explained that they use YouTube in two different use cases, and
that they preferred different levels of control for each. When they had a
specific intention in mind, such as watching that tutorial and how to solve
a Rubik's Cube. They wanted more control when they did not have a specific
intention in mind, and they just wanted to relax or felt bored, they wanted to
let YouTube take control.
This leads us to our design implications. Our first design
implication is to adapt the interface to the specificity of the user's intention.
For example, when the user has a specific intention, the designer can
present a search-first interface. On the other hand, when the user has no
specific intention, the designer can present a recommendations-first
interface. Switching between these two interfaces might be done either manually
by the user, or automatically by the system.
Our second design implication is to help the user make a micro plan, which we
define as a lightweight plan that guides behavior for a short time, usually just
a single session of use. So for example, the playlist feature in YouTube helped
with this. But we argue that there's more designers can do here by drawing
upon knowledge from the field of behavior planning.
In conclusion, we encourage designers to think beyond the screentime paradigm
support greater control when users have a specific intention in mind, and help
users micro plan. Thank you.