FinerMe: Examining App-level and Feature-level Interventions to Regulate Mobile Social Media Use

Image: people engaged on their phones (Pexels)

This blog summarizes the paper “FinerMe: Examining App-level and Feature-level Interventions to Regulate Mobile Social Media Use” by Adiba Orzikulova, Hyunsung Cho, Hye-Young Chung, Hwajung Hong, Uichin Lee, and Sung-Ju Lee presented at the 26th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW).

Social media apps offer a range of beneficial features, including direct messaging and content sharing, which can facilitate meaningful connections. However, they can also lead us into the trap of mindlessly scrolling through an endless stream of recommended content, often leaving us dissatisfied with our social media experience.

Prior studies primarily focused on regulating social media at the phone or app level, by tracking usage and restricting access. However, given the mix of beneficial and potentially harmful features within social media apps, it is crucial to develop a self-regulatory system that considers these distinct characteristics and regulates usage at the feature level.

What did we build?

To address this gap and explore how the effectiveness of interventions differs between app-level and feature-level approaches, especially on popular social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube, we introduce FinerMe. FinerMe is a mobile smartphone intervention app providing more nuanced social media regulation.

We developed two versions (app-level and feature-level) of our intervention app, FinerMe. FinerMe allows users to set goals, view usage statistics, and limit access to social media at both app- and feature-level granularities.

Using YouTube’s Explore feature (Left). Showing YouTube usage statistics at app level (Center) and feature level (Right). Image credits to Pexels for the cheerful woman sitting with a laptop and the drone flight over the sand.

Providing usage statistics is a regulatory technique that increases users’ self-awareness. After completing an app session, app-level FinerMe (center) informs users about their time spent on social media (in the above example, YouTube). In contrast, feature-level FinerMe (right) breaks down the YouTube session into individual features, displaying the time spent on each feature and the number of visits, thus offering more detailed usage insights.

Watching Instagram Reels (Left). Limiting access to the Instagram at app level (Center), and Instagram Reels at feature level (Right). Image credits to Pexels for the city fashion man people.

However, some users can ignore usage statistics without internalizing their implications. An alternative approach is to block users’ access to apps. Similarly, we designed restriction-based interventions at app-level and feature-level granularities. For instance, when users exceed their daily usage limit, the app-level FinerMe (center) intervention restricts access to the entire Instagram application for a predefined duration. In contrast, the feature-level FinerMe (right) intervention limits access solely to the specific features that have exceeded their usage threshold, allowing users to use the other features freely.

What did we learn?

We conducted a field study in the wild with 56 participants over 16 days to answer the following question:

“How does applying app- and feature-level interventions impact mobile social media use behavior?”

Key takeaways:

• Both app-level and feature-level interventions (usage statistics along with access restrictions) effectively reduced the time spent on social media apps.
• Feature-level interventions helped reduce the use of app features associated with passive social media consumption, such as viewing comments on YouTube and scrolling through Instagram feeds. Meanwhile, active features such as direct messaging and search remained unaffected.
• Additionally, feature-level interventions increased users’ self-awareness of regretful usage patterns. The more users encountered interventions at the feature level, such as limiting access to viewing Instagram stories, the more they regretted their social media usage.

Check out our presentation at the #CSCW2023 conference on October 16 (2:30 ~ 4:00 PM) in the Social Regulation and Control session!

Adiba Orzikulova, Hyunsung Cho, Hye-Young Chung, Hwajung Hong, Uichin Lee, and Sung-Ju Lee. FinerMe: Examining App-level and Feature-level Interventions to Regulate Mobile Social Media Use. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW2, Article 274 (October 2023), 30 pages. Check out our full paper here.