Lucía Magis Weinberg and graduate student Dani Munoz Lopez contributed to research finding that teens often feel bored when using Instagram
Assistant Professor Lucía Magis-Weinberg and Graduate student Dani Munoz Lopez contributed to new research finding that teenagers open Instagram because they are bored, and boredom is the dominant experience teens have on the app, rather than negative feelings.
Read the full UW press release here: Even on Instagram, teens mostly feel bored | UW News (washington.edu)
The research study is available here: https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3655812
The study tracked the experience of 25 teens using the platform, finding that they open the app, scroll quickly through irrelevant content, and direct message friends. Once they feel bored with what researchers call a “content soup,” they log off.
Participants completed a survey after five minutes of time on Instagram, and once every three hours on an application called AppMinder. Teens leaned on a few techniques to stabilize their experiences — such as using likes, follows and unfollows to curate their feeds, and racing past aggravating content. The researchers used these results to make a few design recommendations, including prompts to cue reflection while using the app or features that clarify and simplify how users can curate their feeds.
The UW team included co-senior authors Katie Davis, Associate Professor in the Information School (iSchool) and director of the UW Digitial Youth Lab; Alexis Hiniker, Associate Professor in the iSchool and director of the User Empowerment Lab; and graduate students Rotem Landesman (iSchool), Jina Yoon (Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering), and JaeWon Kim (iSchool). The team presented the findings recently at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Interaction Design and Children Conference in Delft, Netherlands.