Doomsurfing, doomscrolling or zombie scrolling. These new additions to the tech vocabulary have become part of everyday routine, scrolling endlessly through social media feeds. Furthermore, some users report a sense of compulsion, a decrease in mental wellbeing and an increased sense of distraction. A common complaint among users harks back to the Facebook newsfeed. In a field experiment with real Facebook users (n= 138), the authors investigate the difference between a strict newsfeed diet (where the newsfeed is automatically reduced to a minimum) and self-regulated newsfeed diet (where the newsfeed is reduced, but users can then manage its content). The results indicate that both of these newsfeed diets are effective at reducing the time spent on Facebook’s platform (-64% for the strict diet, -39% for the self-regulated diet). Their findings also suggest that these design interventions come with positive and negative user experiences such as increased self-awareness and fear of missing out (FOMO).

In this cross-sectional study of apps used by 160 children aged 3 to 5years, the majority were associated with manipulative design features that included parasocial relationship pressure, fabricated time pressure, navigation constraints, and use of attractive lures to encourage longer gameplay or more purchases, in addition to advertisement-based pressure; only 20% of apps had no manipulative design features. Also, children from lower socioeconomic strata played apps with more manipulative design. These results suggest that interactive designs that serve the interests of technology companies over the interests of children are common and deserve further study and regulation.

The work aimed to explore the ethical dilemma in design that User Experience (UX) designers encounter in their workplace: consumers’ perception of ethics in bright patterns and dark patterns, and consumers’ decisions between bright patterns and dark patterns. Among others, the findings show that: authority to decide how designers should address ethics in design is more distributed to those investing in a product development project and most ethical issues revolve around challenges of working in an ethical manner rather than bad practices of incorporating ethics in design.

It is apparent that consumers value their privacy and enjoy having control over how their data are used in personalised advertising. However, recent studies show that users are less open to the idea of offering personal information in exchange for such advertisements which are more relevant to their tastes. This work is valuable because it sets out in more detail concerns about platforms’ choice architecture, considers how choice architecture can affect consumers’ engagement and decision making, among others.

Waldman considers the argument of researchers that users trade privacy for convenience, highlighting that this stance ignores important cognitive biases and design tactics used by platforms to manipulate users into disclosing information. This essay highlights some of those cognitive biases – from hyperbolic discounting to the problem of overchoice – and discusses the ways in which platform design can manipulate disclosure. It then explains how current law allows this manipulative and anti-consumer behavior to continue and proposes a new approach to rein in the phenomenon.