From Scroll to Soul: Design Features of Social Media Platforms and Their Impact on Users' Mental Well-Being
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Abstract
The prevalence of mental health issues among adolescents and young adults is increasing, with social media usage identified as a potential contributing factor. As technology becomes more integral to daily life, the design decisions of social media platforms emerge as significant determinants of users' mental well-being.
Despite awareness of social media's general adverse effects, there is a gap in understanding the specific impact of different design features. Academic literature identifies features like likes and direct messaging as having nuanced effects on mental well-being, but lacks a comprehensive overview for developers to reference. This thesis seeks to bridge this gap, focusing on design features and their psychological impacts to propose design interventions for enhancing mental well-being.
Employing Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as an analytical framework, this study is the first to apply VSD to social media in the context of mental well-being. It involves a tripartite methodology — conceptual, empirical, and technical investigations — to identify significant design features and values related to mental well-being on social media platforms. A novel social media platform, Dime, designed with mental well-being in mind, serves as a case study for evaluating these features and proposing design requirements.
The study identifies 8 key design features affecting mental well-being and outlines 13 values divided into higher and lower levels, facilitating focus on critical values for desired outcomes. It explores value interrelationships and conflicts, particularly noting indirect tensions between values like authenticity and connection, and between personalization, control, and autonomy.
Proposed design interventions aim to resolve identified value conflicts, enhancing authenticity to support connection and enhancing personalization and control to support autonomy.