Our paper "Defining and Identifying Attention Capture Damaging Patterns in Digital Interfaces" has been accepted to CHI 2023!
The paper is related to our research activities on the digital wellbeing topic, and is the result of an international collaboration with Kai Lukoff, from the Santa Clara University. It defines and proposes a typology of recurring patterns in digital interfaces that designers use to capture users' attention and maximize advertisement revenue. These attention-capture damaging patterns, from Infinite Scroll to Neverending Autoplay, exploit people's psychological vulnerabilitiesm, often leading the user to lose track of their goals, lose their sense of time and control, and later feel regret.
We see our typology as a promising starting point to establish new procedures for evaluating existing interfaces and support designers in adopting patterns that preserve and respect the users' attention. Furthermore, we hope that our work will give rise to new regulations and policies, something that is already happening for dark patterns that lead to financial and privacy harms.
UPDATE: I presented the paper @CHI2023 on April 26, 2023, in the "Digital Wellbeing" session. Click here to see the video of the presentation, and look at the dedicated page on this website!
More information: