Unhooked by Design: Scrolling Mindfully on Social Media by Automating Digital Nudges

In 2020, over a billion people spent at least three hours a day on social media, primarily engaging in what is described as mindlessly scrolling through their newsfeed. This illustrates the growing societal concern of digital wellbeing and social media addiction. Reducing the time spent on these platforms is challenging since they are designed to be addictive. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a digital nudging intervention that unhooks users from their mindless social media use by making them more mindful. We evaluated the intervention through a two-week single case experimental design (N =20). The findings show that weekly digital consumption was significantly reduced by over 20.58%. The evaluation of the intervention's usability and potential revealed that the intervention made participants mindful of their digital behavior and scored high on usability. Our findings advance how ethical nudges could be self-designed, considering privacy to mitigate social media addiction.

, 2021