News App

& Responsible Behavioural Design

A novel tool for field studies that hooks and protects users:

Baseline design version of the study app contains:

Agreement to privacy policy and terms & conditions
Minimal functional design, without additional behavioural design elements
Newsfeed comes in a simple grey design

Behavioural design version of the study app contains:

Agreement to privacy policy and terms & conditions
No awareness raising to behavioural design at all
Full behavioural design that would reasonably be added in a real app
Newsfeed gets automatically personalized

Transparent design version of the study app contains:

Agreement to privacy policy and terms & conditions
Agreement to behavioural design
Full behavioural design that would reasonably be added in a real app
Newsfeed gets automatically personalized, algorithmic outcome can be monitored, and filter settings can be adjusted
Protection measures are added

Behavioural design elements in the study app are:

Tracking achievements, rewards
Ranking, social comparison
History, tracking progress
Personalisation, filtering
Push notifications, which have a key role in developing habits

Protection measures in the study app are:

Informed consent to behavioural design
Raising awareness and educating with short explanations of the applied mechanisms
Adjustable behavioural design settings
Filter settings and algorithm can be monitored and adjusted
Push notifications can be turned on and off locally and globally in the app
Users can observe, learn about, and adjust triggers of push notifications
Media competency quiz eased the decision whether to agree to the in-app consent (1) quickly, rushing through the text, or (2) carefully, reading the text line-by-line

Responsible Behavioural Design:

Behavioural design is a design framework for programming (i.e. intentionally and systematically changing) human behaviour through hardly avoidable modifications of the physical and digital environment (Combs & Brown, 2018, Digital behavioral design, Venice Beach, CA: Boundless Mind.).

For example, ‘praise’ is a reward technique, in practice often implemented as an encouraging statement or emoji, with the purpose of reinforcing a specific behaviour and creating a new habit.

Ethical, responsible, trustworthy behavioural design means that (based on Fogg, 1998, Persuasive computers: perspectives and research directions. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’ 98). ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., USA, 225-232.):

(1) Software engineers are aware of the consequences, backfiring potentials, and risks of the applied behavioural design elements and test their effects thoroughly.

For example, fun nudges and gamification enhance playful, risk taking, neglecting, dulling, and addictive behaviours.

(2) Users get informed and educated about the applied behavioural design as well as its risks, such as losing money, privacy, or freedom.

(3) Users get the chance to make adjustments and alternative choices, or to protect themselves from unwanted behavioural design.

Implementation & feasibility:

Business models matter:

“If nothing is paid, the user is not the client but the traded goods.”

(from interviews which we conducted)

Barriers to responsible design through systematic moral erosion from one generation of developers to the next:

“Even if I leave the project, there will be the next one doing the job.”

(from interviews which we conducted)

If you are interested in using our study app in field studies, we are happy to collaborate.

dr(dot)chris(dot)timko(at)gmail(dot)com

Publications & Kudos:

Transparent app design reduces excessive usage time and increases willingness to pay compared to common behavioural design: A framed field experiment (Timko & Adena 2023 under review)

The Whooop News App was presented in following workshops and conferences:

Annual conference of the GfeW, Erfurt, 2023