Ulysses in Cyberspace: Examining the Effectiveness of Design Patterns
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Ulysses in Cyberspace: Examining the Effectiveness of Design Patterns for Digital Self-Control Ulrik Lyngs Linacre College University of Oxford A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Michaelmas 2019 To my parents, and to Farfars Hus Acknowledgements In 2006, when I as a young musician began studies at a conservatory in Aarhus, Denmark, I never imagined that I would eventually find my real passion as a Computer Science DPhil student in the United Kingdom. My foremost words of gratitude goes to my supervisor, Sir Nigel Shadbolt, to Max Van Kleek, Jun Zhao, and Reuben Binns, and to the SOCIAM project, who took a chance on an enthusiastic musician-turned-cognitive psychologist and offered me a life- changing opportunity. The beginning of my DPhil was an intense learning experience, where I sought to consolidate fundamental skills of computer science. A special thanks to my friends Philippe Syz and Lukas Frischknecht, who were MSc students at the time and helped me fill my knowledge gaps in the first terms — they were fluent coders, but had no office space; I badly needed to improve my coding, and had an office, a whiteboard, and lots of coffee. In early May 2017, I travelled to Denver, US, for my first ACM CHI conference and the first real meeting with my new academic tribe of Human-Computer Interaction researchers. CHI’s mix of computer science, psychology, design, and sheer excitement about digital technology’s potential to improve the world, was unlike any academic conference I had ever attended, and gave me a solid motivation boost after seven intense months of trying to find my feet. At this conference, I met one of my key collaborators, Kai Lukoff, who had begun his PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle around the same time as me, and worked on a very similar project. Kai ended up as co-author on three of my paper submissions to subsequent CHI conferences and deserves special thanks for his ongoing support, enjoyable collaboration, and friendship. As I shifted my efforts more and more to independent research, a large number of people became invaluable as collaborators and mentors. For whereas interdisciplinary research’s ambition is to constructively integrate diverse perspectives, it more easily provides an opportunity to simply disappoint people across multiple fields. My sincerest thanks, therefore, to all the wonderful people who supported my DPhil project through guidance, critique, constructive conversation, encouragement, and joint efforts to work through challenges along the way. In addition to Nigel, Max, Jun, Reuben, and Kai, a special thanks to Petr Slovak and Maureen Freed, as well as to Michael Inzlicht, Nick Yeung, Will Seymour, Adam Slack, Nitin Agrawal, Martin Kraemer, Gatis Mikelsons, Helena Webb, Marina Jirotka, and Nadia Flensted Høgholt. Thanks also to Konrad Kollnig, Claudine Tinsman, Jack Johnson, Anirudh Ekambaranathan, and Ge Wang who, in the final stages of preparing this thesis, provided additional help with ironing out typos and poor wordings. Of course, a DPhil in Oxford does not only consist of hard work. My deepest thanks goes to my friends and family who kept me sane and made these years some of the very best of my life. I would like to extend a special thanks to ‘salsadaskerne’, to everyone at the Scandinavian Society, and to the Karaoke Collective family. Most of all, I am grateful to my parents and my brothers for their never-ending love and support, and for enabling me to spend two memorable months at Farfars Hus, where I wrote up the majority of this thesis and watched the sun set over the North Sea. Thanks also to those special people in the R and LATEX community who developed the open source tools I used in the oxforddown package, with which I wrote this thesis in R Markdown and formatted it with the time-tested OxThesis LATEX tem- plate. Thanks to the team at RStudio, not least Yihui Xie for developing rmarkdown and bookdown, to Chester Ismay for thesisdown, and to John McManigles, Sam Evans, and Keith Gillos for the OxThesis template. And finally, thanks to Vassili Christodoulou who, when I explained in a London restaurant in 2016 that I was about to start a PhD project on digital device use and self-control, immediately suggested the title ‘Ulysses in Cyberspace’. Ulrik Lyngs Codrington Library, Oxford 31 October 2019 Abstract Instant access to information, entertainment, and connection enabled by smart- phones and computers provides innumerable benefits, but also unprecedented opportunity for distraction. However, while technology companies have devoted enormous resources to keeping users ‘hooked’ on digital systems, little is known about how designers can best support people in regaining control over their digital device use. This thesis argues that the emerging research into design patterns for digital self-control, which attempts to address this challenge, will benefit from (i) drawing on established psychological research on self-control, and (ii) using the existing landscape of apps and browser extensions for digital self-control on online stores as a resource for understanding potential design patterns and implementations. To substantiate these arguments, the thesis proceeds in four steps: First, we adapt a well-established dual systems framework to the context of digital device use, to help explain the psychological mechanisms that underlie self-control struggles. Second, we investigate digital self-control tools (n = 367) on the Chrome Web, Google Play, and Apple App stores, by analysing their design features, user numbers, ratings, and reviews. Third, we present a controlled study of interventions for Facebook, drawn from popular tools on the Chrome Web store. Fourth, distilling findings from the previous steps, we present a workshop format intended as a research tool for long-term investigation of user struggles and solution strategies, to better understand and respond to the pervasive challenge of digital self-control. Throughout the thesis, we adopt open science practices and make our materials, data, and analyses publicly available. The thesis concludes by arguing that future research should focus on design patterns that enable users to sculpt their digital environments such that the amount of — and motivational pull from — the information they are exposed to remain within a range that allows them to exert effective self-control without being overwhelmed by distractions. Contents List of Figures ix List of Tables xi List of Abbreviations xii 1 Introduction 1 The problem of digital self-control . .1 Research question, approach, and scope . .3 Contributions . .4 Terminology . .6 Thesis outline . .7 Dissemination . .8 2 Background and Motivation 10 2.1 Digital device use and self-control challenges . 11 2.2 What does success look like? . 19 2.3 Studies of design patterns for digital self-control . 24 2.4 Research gaps . 40 2.5 Summary . 45 3 Characterising the Design Space 49 3.1 Introduction . 50 3.2 An integrative dual systems framework for digital self-control . 50 3.3 A review and analysis of current digital self-control tools . 57 3.4 Discussion . 67 3.5 Conclusion . 71 vi Contents 4 Surveying Current Digital Self-Control Tools’ Effectiveness and Challenges 72 4.1 Introduction . 73 4.2 Methods . 76 4.3 Results . 78 4.4 Discussion . 89 4.5 Conclusion . 95 5 A Controlled Study of Interventions for Self-Control on Facebook 97 5.1 Introduction . 98 5.2 Background . 99 5.3 Overview of study . 102 5.4 Methods . 103 5.5 Results . 110 5.6 Discussion . 124 5.7 Conclusion . 129 6 Understanding Personal Digital Self-Control Struggles in the ‘Re- ducing Digital Distraction’ Workshop 131 6.1 Introduction . 132 6.2 Motivation and background . 134 6.3 Methods . 136 6.4 Results . 145 6.5 Discussion . 154 6.6 Conclusion . 160 7 Discussion 162 7.1 Overview of results . 163 7.2 Reflections on methodology . 165 7.3 Reflections on use of theory . 172 7.4 Revisiting what success looks like . 175 7.5 Next steps: Advancing digital self-control research through scalable action research . 181 Conclusion 185 Appendices vii Contents A Chrome extensions for self-control on Facebook 189 B Sample poster from recruitment for the ReDD workshops 192 References 194 viii List of Figures 2.1 Spectrum of specificity in behavioural theories. Adapted from Hekler et al. (2013). 36 3.1 An extended dual systems model of self-regulation, developed from Shea et al. (2014) and Norman and Shallice (1986). 51 3.2 Flowchart of the search and exclusion/inclusion procedure . 59 3.3 Functionality of digital self-control tools (N = 367) . 60 3.4 Functionality of digital self-control tools, by store. 64 3.5 Mapping of design features to the dual systems model . 65 3.6 Percentage of tools which include at least one design feature targeting a given cognitive component of the dual systems framework. 66 4.1 Top digital self-control tools in online stores in terms of number of users. 79 4.2 Top digital self-control tools on online stores in terms of average ratings. 80 4.3 Average ratings by feature combinations (for tools with more than 30 ratings). 81 4.4 Word cloud depicting frequencies of terms across all collected reviews (excluding the terms ’app/s’, ’phone’, and ’extension’). 82 5.1 Mockup of study conditions: Cgoal (adding a goal prompt when visiting the site that every few minutes pops up a reminder), Cno-feed (removing the newsfeed), and Ccontrol (white background). 105 5.2 Flowchart of the study procedure . 109 5.3 Time spent and number of visits made to Facebook. 113 5.4 Scores on the Passive and Active Facebook Use Measure by condition.115 5.5 Responses from survey question on control included in the survey administered by the end of the intervention block.