Expected behavioural effects of alerts to impolite online news commenters: the impact of previous commenter’s politeness and guidance features

Abstract

Uncivil commenting on online news articles tends to harm journalists, news readers, and public discourse. Recent HCI research proposes that such behaviour could be mitigated by alerts (e.g. instructional pop-up notifications) to users while writing seemingly impolite messages. However, the design space of such alerts and the contextual factors influencing users’ perceptions of them remain largely unexplored. Informed by principles of behaviour design, we examined the impact of three factors on the perceived quality and expected effectiveness of alerts: the level of politeness of the comment that the alerted user was responding to and the form and amount of guidance in alert designs. We used a 2 × 2 × 3 factorial quasi-experiment, implemented as an international online survey (N =248) targeting online news commenters. The results showed that the politeness of the recipient impacted how the comment was perceived but had no effect on the evaluation of the alert. Additionally, alerts with behavioural guidance were preferred over those without. As for effects of background variables, participants’ commenting frequency was not found to influence alert scoring. This study expands our understanding of the design space for user interface alerts and the contextual factors that influence their perceived quality.