Even on Instagram, teens are usually bored: Researchers offer design recommendations

Concern that social media is driving the teen mental health crisis has reached such a level that a majority of states in the country have filed lawsuits against Meta (which owns Instagram and Facebook) and the U.S. Surgeon General Last month, they called for warning labels to be placed on platformssimilar to those of tobacco.

But a new study from the University of Washington finds that while some teens experience negative feelings when using Instagram, the overriding feeling they feel when using the platform is boredom. They open the app because they’re bored. They then scroll through largely unrelated content, feeling mostly bored, while searching for interesting things to share with their friends in direct messages, the most consistent source of connection they’ve found on the platform. Then, tired of what the researchers call a “content soup,” they log off.

The study tracked the moment-by-moment experiences of 25 American teens as they used the app. Teens relied on a few techniques to stabilize their experiences, such as using likes, follows, and unfollows to curate their feeds, and quickly moving past annoying content. The researchers used these findings to make a few design recommendations, including prompts to encourage reflection while using the app or features that clarify and simplify how users can curate their feeds.

The team present his research on June 18 at the ACM Interaction Design and Children conference in Delft, the Netherlands.

“Social media gets talked about in extreme terms a lot,” says lead author Rotem Landesman, a doctoral student at the University of Washington’s School of Information. “You hear about harassment or bullying — which are real things — or this kind of techno-utopian vision of things. Companies like Meta and others seem to say they’re constantly thinking about well-being, but we haven’t seen any concrete results yet. So we really wanted to look at the everyday, mundane experiences of teens using Instagram.”

To capture this moment-to-moment experience, the team first trained participants in mindfulness techniques and asked them to download an app called AppMinder. The simple interface, developed by the researchers, appeared five minutes after the teens began using Instagram and asked them to fill out a quick questionnaire about their emotional feelings and reasons for their behavior. The pop-ups appeared once every three hours. The teens were expected to use Instagram and fill out at least one response per day for seven days, although many submitted multiple responses each day.

Finally, the researchers surveyed the teens about their responses and asked them to open Instagram again and report how they felt in real time and explain how they experienced certain features.

“We saw teens turning to Instagram in moments of boredom, looking for some form of stimulation,” said Alexis Hiniker, co-lead author and associate professor at the University of Washington’s iSchool. “They were finding enough moments of closeness and connection with their friends on the app to keep them coming back. That value is there, but it’s actually buried in gimmicks, attention-grabbing features, sometimes disturbing or frustrating content, and a ton of junk.”

Most of the content Instagram’s algorithm suggested wasn’t what teens were looking for. Yet they were scrolling through hundreds of posts to find a single meme or fashion inspiration to share with their friends. Overall, it was the app’s direct messaging feature that resonated most with them, not scrolling.

Because they found value in specific experiences, teens used several mitigation strategies to focus their time on the app:

• They try to manage their feeds to highlight posts that make them feel good rather than bad or annoying, by following, unfollowing, hiding, and liking.
• Scrolling quickly, skipping or logging out when the content made them uncomfortable
• Enable/disable Instagram features (hide like count, turn off certain notifications) to reduce negative emotions

“Instagram’s algorithmically curated push notifications and feeds constantly promise teens a meaningful interaction experience, while only intermittently delivering on that promise,” said Katie Davis, co-lead author and associate professor at the UW iSchool. “Unfortunately, it’s much easier to identify the problem than to fix it. The current business model of most social media platforms is based on keeping users scrolling as often and for as long as possible. Legislation is needed to force platforms to change the status quo.”

Based on their findings, the researchers proposed three design changes to improve the teen experience:

• Notifications, like those from AppMinder, that prompt teens to think about what they’re doing on Instagram and reflect on the moment
• Features that make it easier to select feeds, like a “This is good for me” button that clearly highlights positive content
• Using data to track signs of well-being and their opposite, for example, tracking when users skip content or log out and associating this data with other data

This summer, the team will take the data from the study and review it with a separate group of teens, with the goal of gaining more information and recommendations.

“It is not and should not be the sole responsibility of teenagers to improve their experiences, to navigate these algorithms without knowing exactly how they work,” Landesman said. “That responsibility also falls on the companies that run the social media platforms.”

Additional co-authors include Jina Yoon, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; JaeWon Kim, a UW doctoral student in the iSchool; Daniela E. Muñoz Lopez, a UW doctoral student in psychology; and Lucía Magis-Weinberg, a UW assistant professor of psychology.