Chirp | Amanda Baughan

Have you ever experienced mindless scrolling?

If so, you’ve likely experienced normative dissociation, or complete attention focused on a narrow range of experience. When dissociated, people stop paying attention to anything outside of their field of attention - this can include their surroundings, the passage of time, and even actions taken. Importantly, during normative dissociation, one’s sense of agency and self-reflection is reduced.

For example, highway hypnosis is a common form of normative dissociation in which one can be driving down a long stretch of highway with few demands on attention, be spontaneously swept up in a daydream, and then 5 minutes later snap their attention back to the road. All the while, they made safe driving decisions.

I was curious about whether people experience dissociation while scrolling on social media, and specifically Twitter. Therefore, we designed the study detailed below. I worked with a team of designers, developers, and researchers to execute this study (Baughan et al., 2022).

Stage 1. Survey

We initiated the project with a survey of Twitter users, asking them about the aspects of Twitter that make participants feel most in control and least in control, as sense of control is affected by dissociation. This revealed how 16 different features of Twitter affect users’ sense of control, particularly related to feed organization, UI/Usability issues, and notifications and recommendations (Zhang et al., 2022).

This diverging bar chart shows how many times the 16 features were mentioned as leading participants to feel least or most in control when using the Twitter mobile app. Features are sorted by the frequency with which they were mentioned by participants.

Stage 2. Design Workshop

We recruited four expert designers for a design workshop focused on ways to improve users’ sense of agency when using Twitter. Designers’ ideas centered on feed organization, content organization, recommendations, and ads. From here, we identified that we wanted to focus on internal design supports, that fundamentally changed how users interacted with Twitter, and external design supports, that added additional mechanisms for digital well-being to the existing UX.

Sketches from the design workshop: 1) a timeline that is organized by topics, such as art, business, or news, which can be shown or hidden; 2) adjusting the personalization algorithm: the user can adjust the novelty of the recommendation algorithm from showing only similar tweets to always showing new tweets; 3) advanced notifcation control: one participant recommended the notifcation setting page of the News Break app, which allows the user to restrict notifcations to certain times of the day

Stage 3. Prototyping Designs

High-Fidelity Prototyping: UI Designer leveraged Figma to construct detailed prototypes based on iterative improvements to the design workshop artifacts. These prototypes retained the familiarity of Twitter, while introducing new tools to increase users' sense of agency.
User Interface Design: Our engineer added four features to Chirp to increase users' sense of agency: a) reading history labels, b,c) removing the main feed and categorizing content into list feeds, d) adding a usage statistics page, and e) adding a timeout dialog every 20 minutes.

Stage 4. Implementation and Piloting

We conducted user testing for one week with the designs on an Android app with a diverse group of app users, gathering insightful feedback on the redesign. This phase was crucial in identifying unforeseen usability issues and validating the effectiveness of the new design elements. Iterative refinements were made based on this feedback, fine-tuning the app’s interface to maximize user satisfaction and engagement.

Stage 5. Launch with 43 participants

We launched the app with 43 participants who used Chirp for four weeks, each week with a different experimental condition of 1) internal design support (a,b,c) present, 2) external design support (usage stats page, below, and timeout dialog after 20 minutes of use) present, all design support present, or no design support present. We conducted exit interviews with 11 participants.

Outcomes: Data Analysis and Results

Nearly half of our participants had at least one instance in which they were dissociating while using Chirp, and many participants discussed in interviews how easy it was to lose track of time mindlessly scrolling online. Data collected from in-app surveys and interviews revealed that participants felt more in control while using Chirp, especially when internal design supports (a,b,c) were present. These also reduced dissociation, which was confirmed both by quantitative analysis and qualitative feedback. Users said they “felt safer” using Chirp, because they knew an end-of-use experience was inherent to their use.

This may explain why so many people have unsatisfying relationships with social media that they are simultaneously unwilling to quit. Dissociation is a natural part of healthy cognitive functioning, and taking a break through one’s phone is a convenient mechanism for doing so. However, once on a social media platform, this dissociation is prolonged beyond what users may have intended for their own time management. This offers an alternative to the social media addiction narrative. For further reading, you can see our feature in Scientific American and The Wall Street Journal, or read the papers here.

Many people have experienced mindlessly scrolling on social media. We investigated these experiences through the lens of normative dissociation: total cognitive absorption, characterized by diminished self-awareness and reduced sense of agency. To explore user experiences of normative dissociation and how design affects the likelihood of normative dissociation, we deployed Chirp, a custom Twitter client, to 43 U.S. participants. Experience sampling and interviews revealed that sometimes, becoming absorbed in normative dissociation on social media felt like a beneficial break. However, people also reported passively slipping into normative dissociation, such that they failed to absorb any content and were left feeling like they had wasted their time. We found that designed interventions–including custom lists, reading history labels, time limit dialogs, and usage statistics–reduced normative dissociation. Our findings demonstrate that interaction designs intended to capture attention likely do so by harnessing people’s natural inclination to seek normative dissociation experiences. This suggests that normative dissociation may be a more productive framing than addiction for discussing social media overuse.

Existing designs helping people manage their social media use include: 1) external supports that monitor and limit use; 2) internal supports that change the interface itself. Here, we design and deploy Chirp, a mobile Twitter client, to independently examine how users experience external and internal supports. To develop Chirp, we identified 16 features that influence users’ sense of agency on Twitter through a survey of 129 participants and a design workshop. We then conducted a four-week within-subjects deployment with 31 participants. Our internal supports (including features to filter tweets and inform users when they have exhausted new content) significantly increased users’ sense of agency, while our external supports (a usage dashboard and nudges to close the app) did not. Participants valued our internal supports and said that our external supports were for “other people.” Our findings suggest that design patterns promoting agency may serve users better than screen time tools.