Team 10: Midpoint Writeup

Problem Domain

Billions of people use social media today. Applications such TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube all provide users with short-form content and employ predictive algorithms that provide users with an ongoing stream of videos catered to personal preferences. However, many people recognize that they spend too much time scrolling through videos and want a way to break the habit but don’t know how. Inspired by our own excessive social media usage and desire to change, we aim to create a tool that can free people from deadlock scrolling. 

Baseline Study

We’re targeting people that feel unsatisfied with their social media usage and want to lower their social media screen time. To find participants, we sent out screeners to assess how much time people spent on their phone in general, how much time was spent on social media/short-form content applications, how satisfied they felt with their screen time (1-5), if they’ve tried changing their screen time before, etc. Because the screener filtered people that spend a lot of time on IG/TikTok/Youtube Shorts and are unhappy with it, we effectively found people that would want to use and benefit from our ideal product. 

For our baseline study, we selected eight individuals that want to reduce their social media consumption and screen time. We first conducted pre-study interviews to gather insights on our participants’ current scrolling habits as well as their existing relationship with behavior change. We then conducted a five-day diary study, during which they logged every time they consumed short-form content and completed a short questionnaire afterwards. The questionnaire collected data on how long the session lasted, what setting the participant was in while scrolling, and sentiment data on how they felt during and after scrolling.

To synthesize all of the data we got from the study, we started out by fragmenting all user data so it would be easy for us to start categorizing. We categorized our data from the stickies by affinity mapping and frequency mapping. Both forms of mapping allowed us to figure out the most surprising patterns that we wouldn’t have guessed — in this case, the fact that some participants avoid opening reels in public because they find it embarrassing.

We then broke down our data into various visual diagrams:

In this first diagram, we can see all of the various factors that contribute to scrolling and how they’re connected. Someone that’s with their friends is less likely to scroll because of social pressure. Similarly, the anxiety inducing social pressure of scrolling in public when seen by others can prevent someone from scrolling. Most users scrolled when bored to fill their time, especially because it’s so easy to do.

Our fishbone diagram further conveys various reasons why someone may scroll, but in a more organized way. For example, most people scroll while eating (dining hall), in bed (privacy!), or in any free time during classes (boredom/ease of use). 

Our feedback loop further shows all of the relationships and correlations between various emotions, environments, and actions that lead to scrolling or not scrolling. We can once again see that people stop scrolling the most when they’re hanging with friends or doing work, and scroll the most when they’re bored/resting/eating/alone.

Each visual diagram helps us emphasize the most important factors towards scrolling. People are scrolling the most when they’re alone or stationary, and they’re scrolling the least when they’re around others or in any situation that can cause social pressure. This lets us ponder the question of how, then, can we capitalize on social pressure or get people to avoid being alone?

Comparative Analysis

We conducted user studies on 10 distinct mobile applications centered around intervening total screen time or application-specific usage. Common weaknesses that were highlighted were: easy-to-use intervention bypassing mechanism, relying solely on contextual prompts to change user behavior is not a good idea, requiring heavy manual inputs from users can lead to user friction during set-up.

We also drew away common strengths from the analysis which were: applying friction when users are attempting to remove the blocking functionality is effective; providing meaningful synthesized data from screen usage can be informative; active form of intervention such as locking users out of the app provides the extra nudge our users need.

We evaluated these apps by difficulty and intervention, which helped us determine which of our competitors’ strengths we should capitalize on, and which competitors’ difficulties we should try to avoid. We ultimately want to incorporate multiple intervention methods at a single time, e.g. location-based access + data synthesis feedback + adding friction when bypassing blocking functionality. For more info, see our full baseline study design here.

Literature Review

To ensure we weren’t reinventing the wheel, we studied past interventions and literature around social media usage and addiction. We compiled 10 articles and categorized them into 3 groups:

1. Social media addiction

There’s a distinction between social media addiction and more classical forms of addiction, such as addiction to gambling or nicotine. These papers helped us understand the different mechanisms beneath apps such as TikTok and Instagram and better equipped us to form an intervention.

2. Scrolling through the pandemic

As a result of the pandemic, people were forced to spend unprecedented amounts of time on screens; people’s screen times jumped dramatically during this period as their attention was splintered between work-life and home-life.

3. Intervention approaches

Strategies for lowering screen time include: mechanic-based interventions, notification-based interventions, accountability-based approaches, and exercise-based interventions.

For a detailed look at our literature review, you can follow the link here.

Personas and Journey Maps

After multiple different personas, we narrowed down to our key users: Bored Bob and Busy Billy.

Name of persona: Bored Bob	Project	Team 10 – Claire Muscat
	Role	Recently graduated student-athlete working at the mall in a shop for sports simulations
	Goal	Wants to reduce screen time after seeing friends & colleagues lower screen timer → social pressure
	Motivation	Competitive nature from playing sports; actively compares his screentime with his colleagues and friends Feels called out / judged by friends with lower screen time Feels that life is a race and he’s actively wasting too much time on social media
	Conflict	A lot of downtime at work + ease of use makes it hard to get out of the habit of overuse Short-form content is SO easy to consume → there’s always more
	Attempts to Solve	Tried to reduce screen time during golf season by turning the phone off while at practice or tournaments (normally would go on the phone while waiting or walking the course). Saw lower screen time in general, but only lasted during golf season → when the season ended, phone usage / social media usage went back up to normal levels
	Setting/ Environment	Often go on it at work during downtime Sometimes go on at home or in the car when waiting for people Would go on during a round of golf / in-between holes
	Tools	Tight knit social circles. Golf clubs and balls. Gym equipment such as dumbbells. Appstore – access to applications Iphone
	Skills	Having alternative ways to spend time → like reading a book Free-weight workout. (Athlete)
	Routines	Downtime at work between customers Waiting for people Check notifs when waking up / before sleeping
	Habits	Scroll when bored and scroll until bored or tired Sending and receiving funny videos Feeling bad about using social media so much

Bored Bob is a recently graduated student-athlete now working at a sports simulator shop at a local mall. Bob spends ~8h/day on his phone; after discussing with friends (who spend way less time on their phones), he really wants to make an effort to lower his screen time through reducing the amount of time spent on social media apps, namely Instagram. From years of team sports, Bob is extremely competitive in all aspects of life. He cannot stand feeling inferior to his colleagues and friends who have lower screen time and lower social media app usage. 

Bored Bob has a lot of time on their hands with large chunks of time that can be filled up with something like social media scrolling. There are no real reasons for Bored Bob to stop scrolling, but they do feel bad about it since they feel like they’re wasting time. This journey map tells the relatable story of a young person grappling with the addictive nature of social media and his desire to break out of a habitual cycle of always going for his phone during down time and getting lost in extended scrolling sessions. There are some key insights especially in regards to the social nature, or lack thereof with Bored Bob’s scrolling sessions. At times, even when surrounded by friends, the activity that everyone participates in would be scrolling which is not truly “social”. Bored Bob feels a lot of social pressure to want to decrease screen time but has a hard time since it’s the most comfortable, normal, and time consuming thing to do.

Name of persona: Busy Billy	Project	Team 10 / Christina Kwak
	Role:	Stressed out undergraduate CS student
	Goal	Does not want to spend hours mindlessly scrolling and consuming short-form content.
	Motivation	Spend more time studying and being productive. Getting good grades in classes is a major motivation. More screentime leads to less time spent studying. Also, I only have a limited amount of time to do everything: socialize, study, work out and etc.
	Conflict	Social media destresses me and I get excited by the idea of going on and checking what people have been up to. Communicates with friends via instagram, tiktok
	Attempts to Solve	I’ve tried to use screen time limits but seeing how high my screen time is was stressing me out so I stopped. Also, I tried using turning my phone off or leaving the phone in my dorm when going to classes; but I need my phone to communicate and fit in.
	Setting/ Environment	I go on when I’m procrastinating or have free time and usually get off when there’s an immediate thing to attend to (ie. meeting or class) Also, I tend to consume short-form content when I am anxious or stressed out; it takes my mind away from the stressors.
	Tools	Roommates/Dorm mates Like-minded friends in similar circumstances Books/notepads Laptop University gym Public park University offers CS247: Design for behaviour change, which provides insight into effective ways for change in behaviour
	Skills	Removing access (for books which are equally as addictive as social media)
	Routines	Downtime, time between classes, etc are all usually used for social media.
	Habits	Going on the phone before bed. Texting back to friends instantaneously. Sharing reels and memes to other friends

Busy Billy is an undergraduate CS student who spends over 2 hours a day mindlessly scrolling and consuming short-form contents. Billy is very driven and motivated to do well in school. He wishes to spend more time studying and being productive. Many of Billy’s friends communicate with him through social media such as Instagram and Tiktok. He currently lives in a dorm and has roommates who are willing to cut-down on social media use. Unfortunately because he is very busy, he is not able to spend a lot of mental effort or time into preventing mindless scrolling.

Busy Billy always has a lot of work to do and never enough time to complete all of their work. However, despite the business, and perhaps even because of it, they turn to social media use as a way to procrastinate or destress. There’s a negative cycle that appears with Busy Billy in that social media scrolling becomes a tool to de-stress but it increases the time spent not doing work and leads to an increased amount of stress. This character has little control over their social media use, and has a very hard time managing their screen time without outside prompting.

However, it’s interesting to know that Busy Billy spent a lot of time calling family as well as checking the news on their phone. We can see that Busy Billy has a lot of social motivations and feels that a big reason for not wanting to be scrolling is because of the social implications and judgements from those around them. This social motivation is a big insight that we hope to utilize going forward.

Intervention/Product Ideation

For a detailed analysis of our intervention ideas and their pros and cons, please visit this page.

The key insights motivating our top three intervention ideas were:

1) using social pressures to apply external motivators to decrease deadlock scrolling

2) users need alternatives to scrolling when bored

3) using changes in environment to disrupt scrolling sessions.

Our top three ideas were:

1) leaderboard and competition to see who can have the lowest screen time

2) an app that generates alternative activities for the user

3) an app that forces the user to move in order to keep scrolling.

Ultimately, we chose to pursue a game-like leaderboard for our intervention study. We were excited by this idea and how it capitalizes on the power of external social pressure instead of exclusively internal motivations of the individual causing behavior change. This idea allows for external pressures to be spun into a fun, positive light via a friendly competition.

Intervention Study

Our intervention study was conducted with 8 participants and was focused on capitalizing on the power of social pressures which our participants cited across the board as a main motivation for wanting to decrease their scrolling time. We created an intervention plan in the form of a daily leaderboard that “compared” the participants’ scrolling times and included participants being sent daily ranking updates. This ranking system also played upon our participants’ competitive natures in a similar way that some of our ideation showed us was useful (ie. sharing work out data with friends led to a competitive motivation for working out more).

Key takeaways:

1. People are generally competitive but the power of games and competition is maximized when the participants know one another
2. People respond well to prompts and need more touch points via notifications and real-time feedback throughout the day
3. People get bored easily and lose interest → retention and ultimately behavior change only occurs if users are engaged and have sustained motivation

For a detailed look at our intervention study and synthesis, you can follow the link here.

Affinity Mapping

Fishbone

Connection Circle

Storyboard & Stories

After gaining the key insights from our intervention study, we began creating storyboards to further put ourselves in our users’ shoes and try to discover more emotions that our users may potentially feel as they use our product. In this storyboard, Bored Bob feels horrible after spending hours scrolling on Instagram as a response to his boredom. Once he uses our app, however, he is able to prevent his habit of deadlock scrolling. Because the app reminds him that he’s already been scrolling for 20 minutes and suggests an activity he can do in his current location, Bob snaps out of his deadlock scrolling and does the suggested activity. He ends up feeling happy and fulfilled because he was stimulated by something other than scrolling.

Future Direction

We learned that motivation is strongest when the game is played against friends and not strangers, so we will make sure to create something that fosters friendly competition within one’s social circle. Additionally, we plan to incorporate feedback about more frequent notifications and real-time feedback so that users have prompts to stop scrolling throughout the day as opposed to a daily summary.

As of now, we plan to explore a combination of a leaderboard-style competition with a solution that tracks location (another intervention idea) and can prompt the user to get up and move after exceeding a user-set scrolling time limit. Together, we think that a solution that harnesses the power of social pressure while prompting environment changes to disrupt scroll sessions could be a great tool for empowering individuals to break out of the notorious deadlock scroll.