Designing for User's Digital Wellbeing: Co-creating Nudges with Designers: Designing for user's digital wellbeingCo-creating nudges with designers

Abstract

Digital wellbeing (DWB) became a prominent topic since the use of technology evoked a concern over its impact on users' mental health and wellbeing. Hence, raising designers' interest and recall of DWB is necessary. As nudges approved their effectiveness in changing individuals' behavior in different domains including users' addictive behaviors online, they have not, yet, been used to change designers' behaviors towards wellbeing-sensitive designs. In this study, we conducted a co-design workshop with digital designers to identify what type of nudges they prefer to ensure a more inclusive and wellbeing sensitive design. Basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness were used to represent wellbeing. We performed template analysis on the workshop outputs where 24 nudge ideas were produced by three mixed groups of designers, Human Computer Interaction researchers and psychologists. We identified three themes representing nudge characteristics which are encouraging reflective thinking, facilitating actions, and stimulating heuristic behavior, and six subthemes representing design categories. Our results show that nudges encouraging reflective thinking represent the majority of the suggestions. This result indicates that designers have ownership for reminding themselves to incorporate basic human needs within the design through transparent nudges where the intention of behavior change is clearly identified.