Designing for Digital Detox: Making Social Media Less Addictive with Digital Nudges

Social media addiction concerns have increased steadily over the past decade. Digital nudges have previously been shown to hold enormous potential to change behavior. However, it is not clear how they might be designed to combat social media addiction. In this late-breaking work, we aim at clarifying this issue by investigating how digital nudges can reduce the addictive features of social media and other addictive sites. More precisely, we present the design of NUDGE, a novel browser extension that aims to make social media less addictive by delivering digital nudges founded on behavioral science. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of NUDGE with 67 actual users and 14 university students. Our results show that NUDGE (1) helped users to become reflective of their social media usage, (2) possibly decreased their time spent, and (3) made the experience more pleasant.