How the Design of YouTube Influences User Sense of Agency

TL;DR

This paper investigates how YouTube's internal design features affect users' sense of agency, highlighting that certain features undermine it while others support it, and offers design insights to enhance user control.

Contribution

It shifts focus to internal app mechanisms supporting user agency, based on surveys and co-design sessions with YouTube users, providing practical design implications.

Findings

Autoplay and recommendations undermine user agency

Search and playlists support user agency

Users prefer interfaces that align with their specific intentions

Abstract

In the attention economy, video apps employ design mechanisms like autoplay that exploit psychological vulnerabilities to maximize watch time. Consequently, many people feel a lack of agency over their app use, which is linked to negative life effects such as loss of sleep. Prior design research has innovated external mechanisms that police multiple apps, such as lockout timers. In this work, we shift the focus to how the internal mechanisms of an app can support user agency, taking the popular YouTube mobile app as a test case. From a survey of 120 U.S. users, we find that autoplay and recommendations primarily undermine sense of agency, while search and playlists support it. From 13 co-design sessions, we find that when users have a specific intention for how they want to use YouTube they prefer interfaces that support greater agency. We discuss implications for how designers can help users reclaim a sense of agency over their media use.