Digital Wellbeing Lens: Design Interfaces That Respect User Attention

User interfaces heavily rely on attention-capture design patterns, e.g., infinite scroll and other variable-rewarding mechanisms, that erode users’ sense of autonomy and undermine their digital wellbeing. Instead of having users rely on external self-regulation tools, this paper advocates that tech companies and designers should prioritize users’ digital wellbeing by design. To take a first step in this direction, we present Digital Wellbeing Lens, a Figma plugin that guides designers in creating user interfaces that respect and preserve user time and attention. The plugin allows the continuous evaluation of prototypes against attention-capture patterns, calculating a digital wellbeing score and suggesting suitable design alternatives. Besides introducing the plugin, we demonstrate its practical application through a use case involving the design of a mobile social media app, and we report on the results of a first exploratory study with four designers, discussing the opportunities and challenges of embracing this paradigm shift.