2 research outputs found
Procrastination on Social Networks: Triggers and Countermeasures
Procrastination on social networking sites (SNS) can impact academic performance and user’s
well-being. SNSs embed features that encourage users to be always connected and updated,
e.g., the notification features. Such persuasive features can exploit peer pressure as well and
lead users to believe they are expected to interact immediately, especially for those who may
have less impulse control and seek for relatedness and popularity. We argue that SNS can
be built to host countermeasures for such behavior and help people regulate their usage and
preoccupation about it better. In this paper, we presented a mixed-method study including a
qualitative (i.e., focus groups, diary, interviews, and co-design) and a quantitative phase (i.e.,
a survey) with 334 participants. Through the qualitative phase, we identified: (1) features of
an SNS seen by participants as facilitators for procrastination, e.g., notification, immersive
design, and surveillance of presence, and (2) countermeasures, such as reminders, chat timer,
and goal setting, can be facilitated via SNS design to combat procrastination, and (3) a
pairing between the features and the countermeasures. We then (4) confirmed these results
and the pairing through the survey phase. Our study showed that countermeasures could be
implemented to be universal across all SNS on one or even more device
Procrastination on Social Networking Sites: Combating by Design
Procrastination refers to a voluntary postponement
that prevents people from performing their tasks and can hurt
productivity and wellbeing. Procrastination might occur due to a
lack of motivation to perform tasks or due to the low self-control
that people might have over their time and task management.
Social Networking Sites (hereafter SNS) are designed to enable
their users to engage in online interaction for different purposes
such as increasing popularity or exploring information. SNS
embed influence and persuasion techniques to attract users
which can make them a medium for procrastination where some
users fail to maintain a desirable level of self-control over their
usage. However, we argue that advances in persuasive technology
and gamification techniques can be utilised to augment SMS and
help users to regain self-control over their procrastination.
Implementing these techniques correctly means that users can
still enjoy accessing SNS while maintaining a desirable level of
control over their procrastination. Building these antiprocrastination tools, however, is a challenging design activity
due to their potential of triggering negative side-effects such as
reactance and workarounds, and affecting the overall user
experience. In this paper, we conduct user studies, consisting of
an exploratory stage using focus groups, diary study and
interviews and followed by a design stage based mainly on codesign sessions. Our studies’ participants self-declared having a
problematic degree of procrastination on SNS, to explore
procrastination countermeasure techniques that can augment the
future designs of SNS and how best to apply them