The dark side of the amazing phenomenon of muscle memory on social media.

Abstract

Mobile phones tend to be an extension of our hands, and the apps in them consume most of our time. Spending that much time on mobile apps and, more specifically, on social media apps results in building muscle memory to perform many interface-related actions. When a task is repeated, it becomes part of procedural memory. That type of memory dedicated to movement is called ”muscle memory”, which allows one to perform actions without seeing the screen and, often, without even thinking. The mechanism of muscle memory minimises the load capacity for the users but, on the other hand, makes them vulnerable to the app creators of these apps. The ability to take advantage of users’ muscle memory to promote the app’s goals (new feature launch, click-on ads) came recently into the scientific research scope and still needs to be explored in depth. Instagram in many countries changed the tab bar menu and replaced the most used ”create” action item with the new feature ”Reels”. The new feature, ”Reels”, contains short videos from random content creators. Instagram did that not for the users’ benefit but to promote its new feature. By replacing the most commonly used functions with ’new’ functions at the exact location, Instagram expects the users to press the button they actually did not intend to - which is exactly what a dark pattern is by definition. In this research, through a user study, we evaluated their muscle memory using the tab bar menu on social media apps. The study was conducted remotely, targeting the Greek population. We did that because, in Greece, Instagram has not yet launched the ”Reels” feature. We examined how that change affected the users’ experience and how the users perceived the change. We found that higher usage frequency builds stronger muscle memory. Moreover, the Greek users needed more time and had more miss clicks on their attempts to perform the ”create” task on the interface containing the Reels feature, compared with the initial interface. Combining the previous results with users’ perceived feelings lead us to conclude that the tactic of taking advantage of users’ muscle memory from Instagram to promote a new feature can be characterised as a dark pattern. Lastly, we introduced a new term, ”collective muscle memory”, a phenomenon where users apply muscle memory built from one social media to another. We examined that term by testing whether Instagram users can benefit from their muscle memory to perform similar tasks on Pinterest. To do so, we examined Instagram users without prior experience with Pinterest. We found that frequent Instagram users have statistically significantly lower execution time on Pinterest tasks than the less frequent users with no related muscle memory. Pointing out that ”collective muscle memory” is a valid term in the domain of social media apps.