Die Nachrichten des Instituts für Medieninformatik

Auszeichnung an Rixen et al., MobileHCI

Universität Ulm

ACM Europe Council: Honorable Mention Award | Athen | September 2023

Wir gratulieren Jan Ole Rixen zu seiner Auszeichnung, die er zusammen mit seinen Co-Autoren Luca-Maxim Meinhardt, Michael Glöckler, Marius-Lukas Ziegenbein, Anna Schlothauer, Mark Colley, Enrico Rukzio (alle Uni Ulm) und Jan Gugenheimer (Uni Darmstadt) für die Publikation The Loop and Reasons to Break It: Investigating Infinite Scrolling Behaviour in Social Media Applications and Reasons to Stop erhalten hat.

Abstract
Today's social media (SM) platforms are toolkits consisting of features with different use cases, some strongly related to habitual and regretful use. Especially Infinite Scrolling (IS) has been reported to make users feel like they are being caught in a loop, regretfully elongating SM sessions. We investigated and defined this loop while unveiling the processes that make users break it. Based on a one-week-long field study (N=46), we unfolded and categorized general reasons for leaving social media and related those to IS. In light of our findings, we argue that SM interventions should not only focus on the app but incorporate the user's context, as most reasons to break SM sessions were not related to the app but the user's general context. Our findings and prior work also indicate the coexistence of multiple loops, which we define as inner (intra-session) loops surrounded by an outer (habitual) loop.