UFS “Education for the Future”: (Dis)Engagement by Design: Testing the Effectiveness of Digital Well-Being Strategies Through Field Experiments

As engagement-driven design features increasingly shape everyday smartphone and social media environments, concerns have grown that such design contributes to overuse and undermines users’ digital well-being. At the same time, platforms and devices offer various built-in tools and settings that may help users regain control and limit their use, such as notification settings. Despite widespread recommendations to adopt these counterstrategies, systematic evidence on their actual effectiveness remains limited.

In this talk, I will present findings from a series of controlled field experiments investigating how specific design-based strategies impact objective usage and subjective well-being. We examined the effects of (1) using the smartphone’s grayscale mode, (2) disabling smartphone notifications, and (3) switching off TikTok’s feed personalization. Together, these studies provide empirical insights into the effectiveness and feasibility of design-based strategies that users can implement themselves.

Register at: umfragenup.uni-potsdam.de/educationforthefuture_webinar/

The Zoom link will be sent to all registered participants the day before the event.