How the Design of YouTube Influences User Sense of Agency Kai Lukoff Ulrik lyngs Himanshu Zade University of Washington University of Oxford University of Washington
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] J. Vera Liao James Choi Kaiyue Fan University of Washington University of Washington University of Washington
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Sean A. Munson Alexis Hiniker University of Washington University of Washington
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION In the attention economy, video apps employ design mechanisms “At Netflix, we are competing for our customers’ time, so our competi- like autoplay that exploit psychological vulnerabilities to maximize tors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, etc.” watch time. Consequently, many people feel a lack of agency over - Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO [118, p.50] their app use, which is linked to negative life effects such as loss of sleep. Prior design research has innovated external mechanisms In the attention economy, social media apps employ a variety of that police multiple apps, such as lockout timers. In this work, design mechanisms–such as eye-catching notification icons, tempt- we shift the focus to how the internal mechanisms of an app can ing clickbait, and never-ending autoplay–to maximize their share support user agency, taking the popular YouTube mobile app as of the user’s time. In this pursuit, designers and tech industry in- a test case. From a survey of 120 U.S. users, we find that autoplay siders warn that many of these mechanisms exploit psychological and recommendations primarily undermine sense of agency, while vulnerabilities and harm the interests of the user [18, 63].