Recent research underscored the resurgence of webcam-based eye tracking as a cost-effective, ecologically valid, and scalable choice, attributed to advancements in machine learning-assisted calibration methods. Online gambling poses a public health concern, necessitating innovative research methods and evidence-based strategies for harm reduction. This study investigates users’ fixation patterns on responsible gambling (RG) information in different formats on gambling websites using webcam-based eye tracking. Participants browsed six gambling websites to search for RG information. 19 participants’ data were analyzed on Areas of Interest (AOIs) categorized based on RG formats. The study has found that usability varied across RG formats and also highlights both feasibility and challenges of webcam-based eye tracking for online behavior research, with practical implications to gambling stakeholders.

Persuasive interfaces raise ethical concerns when users are unaware of persuasion or find it hard to resist it. Inoculation Theory suggests that attitudes can be inoculated against persuasive attacks. Studies show that disclosure statements in native advertising help people recognize persuasive intent. Likewise, just-in-time disclosure statements in persuasive interfaces may have a similar effect. In this article, explainable persuasion was used as an inoculation intervention to build resistance against persuasive interfaces. The effectiveness of this approach was assessed via a 4x2 online experiment, taking online gambling as an illustrative domain. 240 participants (age range 18–73 years, 138 male, 100 female, 2 participants choose not to disclose) were recruited from the UK. Inoculation was delivered through an animated video, while explainable persuasion was operationalized through the disclosure of persuasive intent. The findings showed that explainable persuasion increased awareness of the presence and risks of persuasive interfaces and strengthened user resistance to persuasive attempts. Explainable persuasion, being information-based, can be a cost-effective strategy for helping people stay in control over their digital usage while engaging with persuasive technologies.

Persuasive technology refers to digital means that influence attitude behaviour, and decisions. While the professional design of persuasive interfaces considers user interests and freedom of choice a primary requirement, principles and methods to achieve it are yet to be introduced. In the design of persuasive interfaces, fulfilling conditions of informed consent can help establish transparency and address such ethical issues. This paper defined explainable persuasion, its potential form, and benefits and explored whether explainable persuasion is a user requirement on demand. This paper further examined explainable persuasion design from the user’s perspective and reported on acceptance and rejection factors, as well as possible design tensions and solutions. In this study, we took online gambling as a case study. A total of 250 UK-based users of gambling platforms (age range 18–75, 127 female) completed our online survey based on principles of persuasion and explainability. Findings showed that players were aware of the use, persuasive intent, and potential harm of various persuasive design techniques used in online gambling platforms (e.g., the use of in-game rewards, reminders, and praise to encourage further gambling). Despite this awareness, they agreed that explainable persuasion can still help users stay in control of their online experience, increase their positive attitude towards the online system, and keep them reminded of the potential side effects of persuasive interfaces. Future research is required to enhance the design and implementation of explainable persuasion in persuasive interfaces.

Many people worldwide rely on social media to satisfy their social needs for relatedness, learning and enhancing self-esteem. However, over-reliance on social media often results in problematic attachment, which risks personal, social and financial wellbeing. From a design perspective, we argue that social media can be improved with tools to manage such problematic attachment and help users reform their interaction style, social expectations and online identity to restore a healthy reliance. Designing such behaviour change tools can be challenging due to the characteristics of people with problematic behaviours, e.g. denial, relapse and cognitive dissonance. This paper explores the role of social media in such attachment and reveals associated psychological states. Our method provides an ecologically valid exploration through employing diary studies as a data collection method, aiming to introduce countermeasures for problematic attachment in future social media design.

Social technology, in particular, social media has increasingly become part of individual's life. People rely on social media interaction to relate with other people and satisfy their leisure or behavioural support purposes. Features such as those presented in the Honeycomb ecology, e.g. sharing, profiling and reputation, are used as means to that end. Recent designs of technology embed social features in them, enabling people to talk to the machine and interact with it as a sentient being, e.g. chatbot and robots, or use it as a mediator for social interaction, e.g. Social Internet of Things (SIoT). However, we argue that over-reliance on social media may result in a problematic attachment to it leading to a negative impact on users' wellbeing. We conduct a multi-stages study to explore the negative psychological states that social media features can trigger. We mainly employ diary studies trying to increase the ecological validity of our data. We also discuss the enrichment of social media with tools to aid people in staying in control of their attachment and the risks such tools can introduce to user experience as well as their behaviour change process.

Social Network Sites (SNSs) are meant to facilitate interaction between people. The design of SNSs employs persuasive techniques with the aim of enhancing the user experience but also increasing interaction and user retention.Examples include the personalisation of content, temporarily available feeds, and notification and alert features. Socialness is now being embedded in new paradigms such as the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems where devices can link people to each other and increase relatedness and group creation. One of the phenomena associated with such persuasion techniques is the experience of Fear of Missing Out (FoMO). FoMO typically refers to the preoccupation of SNS users with being deprived of interaction while offline. The salience, mood modification and conflict typically experienced as part of FoMO, are symptoms of digital addiction (DA). Despite recognition of the widespread experience of FoMO, existing research focuses on user psychology to interpret it. The contribution of SNS design in triggering FoMO remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a multi-stage qualitative research including interviews, a diary study and three focus group sessions to explore the relationship between SNS features and FoMO. Our findings demonstrate how the different SNS features act as persuasion triggers for certain kinds of FoMO. Also, we suggest features that could be introduced to social network sites to allow individuals to manage FoMO and identify the principles and challenges associated with engineering them.

Online gambling, unlike other mediums of problem-atic and addictive behaviours, such as tobacco and alcohol, offers unprecedented opportunities for building information systems that are able to monitor and understand a user's behaviour in real-time and adapt persuasive messages and interactions that would fit their personal profile and usage context. Online gambling industry usually provides Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) meant mainly to enable third-party applications to network with their gambling services and enhance a user's gambling experience. In this industrial practice and experience paper, we advocate that such API's can also be used to retrieve gamblers' online data, such as browsing and betting history, promotions and available offers and use it to build more intel-ligent and proactive responsible gambling information systems. We report on our industrial experience in this field and make the argument that data available for persuasive marketing and usability should, under specific usage conditions, also be made available for responsible gambling information systems. This principle would provide equal opportunities for both directions. We discuss the psychological foundations of our proposed solution and the risks and challenges typically found when building such a software-assisted intervention, persuasion and emotion regulation technology. We also shed light on its potential implications from the perspectives of social corporate responsibility and data protection. We finally propose a conceptual architecture to demonstrate our vision and explain how it can be implemented. In the wider context, the paper is meant to provide insights on building behavioural awareness and regulation information systems in relation to problematic digital media usage.