Social Media User Empowerment Scale (SMUE-I): An Interface-Facing Measure

The Social Media User Empowerment Scale for Interfaces (SMUE-I) is an interface-facing measure which evaluates social media platforms for User Empowerment, which may be defined as the degree to which it affords agency, control, and ease of use over its interface.

Presently, there does not exist a unified tool for evaluating the levels of User Empowerment of an interface. The design of and use of such a tool may inform users of which platforms provide them with greater agency. An informed userbase may incentivize social media complanies to design more ethical interfaces.

The SMUE-I is a concept measure that would provide each social media platform with a score evaluating the degree of User Empowerment each platform affords. As social media interfaces change over time, the scores for each platform may be tracked as they fluctuate. In addition, this tool could be expanded and applied for a variety of applications, including AR, VR, and potentially any digital interface that exists. However, the utility of the SMUE-I may be best applied for social media platforms due to the competitive nature of the marketplace. As new social media platforms emerge, they may be motivated to design themselves in accordance with the SMUE-I, thus allowing for the cultivation of more ethical interfaces.

SMUE-I Rating System

SMUE-I is a rating system where you create user personas from interviews to reflect a user's motivations, goals, tasks, and preferences for social media use. These user personas are used in several days within screen recordings to train the algorithm and to calculate the SMUE-I score. Several user personas will be used to take sample measurements of social media use over the course of several days.