The Attuned Self Online: Designing for Connection

Abstract

Connection is of pivotal importance to human health and well-being, with relationship satisfaction outweighing factors such as genetics, IQ, and socioeconomic status. Staying connected in the digital age is difficult, as phone usage, social media, and messaging platforms all have the potential to disrupt connection. Technology, and particularly phone addiction and social media, have been criticized for how they can erode users' relationships. In this dissertation, I describe how the design of digital social and communication platforms can help foster attunement: a sense of deep connection, including feeling seen, heard, and known. First, I describe how the current social media landscape falls short of user needs for connection, especially in the face of hard conversations with loved ones, as the result of interviews and a survey. I find that asynchronicity of text-based conversations leads users to feel that conversations are more thoughtful, however, many wish they could have hard discussions online more productively than currently feels possible. Next, I describe the evaluation of 12 user-generated design concepts as storyboards via online survey. I find that users are most excited about design interventions that humanize each other and replicate behavior they already do offline. Next, I describe the user-centered design and research process to create Daffodil Messenger. Daffodil Messenger introduces two novel design approaches to foster a sense of attunement between two loved ones in conflict: tone indicators and pausing, which were iterated on through design sketching, user feedback in interviews, and finally implemented and evaluated with two pilot participants. These participants liked the organization and clarity these designs afforded them, and they wished that it was possible to use these interventions with their friends and partners. This process has resulted in a body of research that demonstrates how design can intervene in hard conversations to foster attunement between loved ones. Finally, I describe how social media design can promote a sense of attunement to oneself by disrupting and reducing dissociation. I do this through the design, development, and evaluation of a mobile alternative to Twitter, called Chirp. I show that users do experience a sense of dissociation while scrolling on social media, and current designs may both induce and prolong this sense of dissociation. By definition, dissociation suspends self-reflection, which is needed to self-attune. I demonstrate how designs such as custom lists and reading history labels can decrease dissociation, and thus, likely increase self-attunement. Taken together, this body of work demonstrates that users have an unmet desire for deeper connection online, and user-centered design can meet these needs.