UXDesign Tag

29 Aug

Posted at 09:34h in Children, Content, Kids, Research, Wellbeing

We’ve all seen it, or lived it. A young child is melting down over wanting “just one more minute” with their tablet. Often, all eyes turn to the parent, silently blaming them for a lack of discipline or control. But is that really what’s happening? Is this behavior simply a part of normal child development, or is it shaped, at least in part, by how the app itself is designed?

A compelling new study by Mallawaarachchi et al. (2025) (full text here) argues it’s not an either/or — it’s both. Their research shows how a child’s self-regulation abilities interact with persuasive app design (PD) to influence how easily (or not) the child can disengage from digital play. 

I heard Dr. Mallawaarachchi present this research at the 2025 Digital Media and Developing Minds International Congress last month, and I was intrigued. “Not all children use screens in the same way,” Dr. Mallawaarachchi explained to me during a recent phone call, “but also screens don’t affect all children the same way.” She noted that some children may come to the experience with a kind of differential susceptibility, meaning their temperament, developmental stage, or disposition might make them more likely to get ‘stuck’ in an app.

As a researcher who helps tech companies do better for children, this interplay between a child’s self-regulation and persuasive design really spoke to me. It reinforced why developmental expertise needs to be present at all stages of design, to ensure that products are not only engaging but also developmentally appropriate.

What is Persuasive App Design?

Persuasive design (PD) refers to features in digital apps or games that are intentionally created to keep users (in this case, children) engaged for longer. These features are intended to capture and hold the user’s attention and make it hard to stop. 

Common examples of PD in children’s apps include:

  • Rewards: Getting virtual coins, new characters, or access to new levels as part of the game experience.
  • Main character pressure: The character might frown or look sad if a child stops playing or makes a certain choice.
  • Locked features tied to in-app purchases: Making certain options of the game only available through payment, prompting children to ask for more time or money to continue playing.
  • Pop-up suggestions for other games: Distractions that encourage children to try an app that is similar to what they are already playing.
  • Autoplay or countdown timers: Creating urgency and discouraging natural stopping points.

While some of these features can enhance gameplay and support learning, they are often used to maximize engagement and revenue, sometimes at the expense of child well-being. Mallawaarachchi emphasized that PD is a continuum of features. ”Of course you want it to promote engagement, but if it’s coming at the cost of the users’ agency, if it’s coming at the fact that you don’t have the freedom to choose what to do, and if it’s coming at the cost of the users’ well-being, to me, that’s deceptive.”

The Study in a Nutshell

Mallawaarachchi et al. looked at how persuasive app design (PD) and children’s self-regulation interact to affect their ability to stop playing a tablet game. Self-regulation is a child’s ability to control their attention, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, even when faced with distractions or impulses. This skill is what helps a child stop a fun game when dinner is ready, or transition calmly from digital play to another activity. This ability develops throughout early childhood and varies among children.

In the experimental study, 3- to 5-year-old children played one of three apps with similar content, each with low, moderate, or high PD. They also considered each child’s own self-regulation score as assessed by two different standardized measures. 

Study Findings

  • Children liked the apps equally, regardless of the number of persuasive design features. This means that app designers don’t need to rely on manipulative features to make apps enjoyable to children.
  • Children with high self-regulation could disengage from any app consistently, regardless of whether the app employed low, moderate, or high PD.
  • Children with low self-regulation disengaged more easily from low-PD apps, but took significantly longer and needed more support when using apps with moderate or high persuasive design.

“If persuasive features override a child’s available strategies and capacities,” Dr. Mallawaarachchi said, “then the child is no longer in control.”

Why it Matters

This study offers key takeaways for both parents and developers. It shows that:

  • Children aren’t drawn to high-PD apps because they’re more fun. They’re drawn in because of design tricks that make stopping harder.
  • App design interacts with a child’s developmental abilities, meaning some children are more vulnerable to persuasive features.
  • The design of the app and the child’s readiness to engage with it are equally important.

The study reveals that persuasive app design doesn’t make apps more appealing, they just make them harder to leave. This knowledge can empower caregivers to make more informed choices about the apps their children use. But it also makes one thing clear: parents shouldn’t have to shoulder this burden alone. Dr. Mallawaarachchi agrees. “One of our key overarching goals in all things we do is really to remove that burden and responsibility from parents and to move it at least a bit more towards other stakeholders like tech companies, their policies, and also the government.”

Shifting Responsibility

I also believe it’s time for a fundamental shift in responsibility. Just as the Children’s Television Act of 1990 rightly restricted character-based advertising during children’s programming, we need similar protections for children in digital spaces today. That means there’s no excuse for developers to keep relying on manipulative features under the guise of “fun.”

If we want a healthier digital world for all children, we can’t just focus on screen limits; we must also focus on screen design. We need to ensure that tech companies are equipped and motivated to do better. This is where my role, sitting at the intersection of developmental research and tech industry practice, becomes especially important. I work with companies that want to do the right thing, but need research-based guidance to get there. I see my job as translating important studies like this into practical insights that help teams design responsibly, before regulation forces them to change.

We also need the voice of children in the design process. I have spoken with hundreds of children in my work. Their opinions, experiences, and ideas are valuable contributions to the development of content made for them and their peers. It’s important that we not only design for them, but with them. Including children in the design process helps ensure the products we build reflect their actual needs, not just assumptions.

To have a real impact, we need:

  • Clearer regulations that limit how many and what kinds of persuasive design elements can appear in apps for children.
  • Industry standards that prioritize developmental needs over monetization, ensuring children’s well-being comes first..
  • Public investment in high-quality digital media for children, setting a higher standard for content development. This investment would demonstrate that it is possible to create engaging, ethical, developmentally-appropriate content to meet children’s needs.
  • Incorporating children’s voices and input from developmental experts to guide tech companies in creating better, more ethical products for young users.

It’s time to stop expecting parents to fight the screen time battles alone. It’s time to design better, together.

By Allison Caplovitz, Director of Content Research and Evaluation.

31 Mar

Posted at 22:05h in Market Research, Research, UX

Last month, I attended the Critical UX: Challenging the Dogma of UX event hosted by HmntyCntrd. At this virtual symposium, academics, researchers and designers from around the world gathered to examine some of the prevailing credos that have emerged in the UX field. What ensued were rich discussions that went beyond buzzwords and unpacked inclusivity, universality, and individualism in UX research and design. At the end, I walked away with a deeper understanding of how to better honor my research participants’ lived experiences.

Three points especially resonated:

The value of wholesale inclusion

It is possible for those involved in research to take a narrow view of inclusion; making it primarily about whether someone from a historically underrepresented group is included in a sample. While representation in a sample is a good step forward, what if inclusion was more than just ensuring that those from underrepresented groups were included in a research?

Panelists at Critical UX asked the audience to scrutinize whether the entirety of their research processes considers the many facets of inclusion. Particularly, they asked those in attendance to think about recruitment processes, research methodologies, and whether built solutions are serving the needs of marginalized groups included in research. Panelist Alex Haargaard mentioned how recruiting people in wheelchairs, for example, could be one part of the inclusion process, but to be more comprehensively inclusive requires more thought into different elements of participation for people in wheelchairs. In practice, this could mean examining a research facility for accessibility or ensuring that tables in a testing room are at a wheelchair friendly height. Comprehensive inclusivity may also mean consistently engaging with wheelchair users through the many different stages of the product design process, so that early prototypes, built solutions, launched products, etc. can be tested with them.

The UX researcher is positioned to advance inclusion by creating research processes that are accessible. And though it may require more effort to sustain their involvement due to systemic barriers, a UX researcher can advocate for underrepresented participants to have a consistent presence in the design process, from product inception through continuous iteration cycles. I am freshly challenged to consider how my research process, from start to finish, can better include marginalized groups.

The importance of making space for different perspectives

In data collection, it’s possible to inadvertently shut out insights from people who have idiosyncratic ways of perceiving the world. This can affect the quality of data and the way it is ultimately used. It can therefore be helpful to proactively invite participants to volunteer their unfiltered perspectives about what matters to them in their daily lives. To illustrate this, panelist Dr. Madhuri Karak recounted a community mapping project with Asian villagers. The research participants insisted on faithful delineations of their places of interest. What resulted was a multi-sensory map that tracked orangutan breeding grounds, riverside resting places, trees with springtime songbirds, and other landmarks that may have been otherwise foregone.

Thinking on Dr. Karak’s example, I could see myself having expected the Asian villagers to map street names, schools, meeting halls, and other similar places when community mapping. Such expectations would reflect my own ideas of what is noteworthy in a community, but would have been an incomplete reflection of the research participants’ ideas of what is noteworthy.

At Fluent, our exploratory research spans the globe and we regularly visit participants’ homes, schools, workplaces, and communities to see their lives in action. Within UX research, it is essential to explore how participants actually perceive the world around them and understand how technological products integrate with their daily lives. For this reason, it’s important to make sufficient space for participants to offer their own perspectives. For me, this may require loosening my expectations for how participants “should” define aspects of their own lives in favor of how they actually define their lives. This may take on even greater importance in cross-cultural settings where research participants may have different worldviews.

The necessity of UX informing decisions about scale

As engineers and designers create technologies for education, healthcare, and other institutional spaces, many of them think about getting their products into as many hands as possible. Panelists had the audience consider the upsides and downsides to scaling up a product’s distribution, and the role that UX research can play in helping make decisions about scale. While some problems can be solved by blanket solutions that serve a broad array of people, other problems may require solutions that are more tailored. Moreover, as automation and AI become a larger part of technological design, questions of human-computer interaction enter the forefront in new ways. To illustrate this, panelist Andrea Ngan raised the question of “scaling health care” with automation, and how for patients, figuring out health care needs through machine interactions may be less appealing than working with other human beings. In cases where users have strong sentiments about a product, the success of a product, no matter how good it is, can hang in the balance.

Ngan’s example sheds light on instances where UX research can contribute to organizational decisions around scale and user adoption. User research can help identify whether a more universal solution can actually meet the differentiated needs of users, or whether a more customized, small-scale approach is more appropriate. UX research can also help understand user needs and sentiments, helping to determine the appeal of a product or service and whether there might be resistance to it. This line of conversation pushes me to think about the myriad of ways user-centric research can impact product design conversations, including some of the bigger questions along the product design roadmap.

Overall, the Critical UX: The Dogmas of UX strengthened who I am as a researcher by inviting me to take a closer look at my own research processes. I am grateful to have spent an afternoon listening to UX leaders who are entertaining the big questions in earnest. Furthermore, I’m eager to put what I’ve learned into practice to better elevate the voices and stories of participants I work with at Fluent.

By Senior User Experience Researcher Farrah Brensinger