Received May 17, 2021, accepted May 22, 2021, date of publication June 9, 2021, date of current version June 16, 2021. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3087740 Attention-Based Design and User Decisions on Information Sharing: A Thematic Literature Review ZAID AMIN 1,2 , NAZLENA MOHAMAD ALI 1 , AND ALAN F. SMEATON 3 , (Fellow, IEEE) 1 Institute of IR4.0 (IIR4.0), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi 43600, Malaysia 2 Faculty of Informatics Engineering, Universitas Bina Darma, Palembang 30264, Indonesia 3 Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, D09 Ireland Corresponding author: Nazlena Mohamad Ali (nazlena.ali@ukm.edu.my) This work was supported by the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia research grant under Grant GPK-4IR-2020-019. ABSTRACT The spread of misinformation and disinformation online can do serious damage to individuals, organizations, and society in general. To fully comprehend user interaction when sharing information online, we need to examine why users decide to share misinformation without attentive behavior and how the latest attention-based design approach can address this. We investigate and represent knowledge based on Human- Computer Interaction by applying an ontological approach through a thematic literature review to describe a clearly coherent and well-defined pattern about the relationship between attention-based design and user decisions on information sharing. We conducted a review to collect, examine, and synthesize outputs of previous studies, mixing both forward and backward search strategies. Three key themes we identified include attention-based design, attentive behavior for information sharing, and attention-based design on information sharing. The review interpreted that, (1) attention-based design is significantly related to user decisions on information sharing, and a better understanding of the link between these is not yet properly described, (2) attention-based design has a further influence on increasing task effectiveness when users are dealing with a task where they are more focused and aware, (3) attention-based design, including selective attention, can influence user decisions, especially in completing tasks that emphasize a visual- based approach, (4) attention-based design is an indispensable feature to increase user attention when sharing information on the omnipresence of social media, and (5) psychological factors such as social influences, epistemic belief and cognitive dissonance affect user decisions when sharing information. INDEX TERMS Attention-based design, decision making, information sharing, misinformation, ontology. I. INTRODUCTION ‘‘Pay attention or pay the price’’ is a creative tagline for non- commercial adverts, which is defined by Auckland Transport regarding the significance and lack of attentive behavior often encountered in people [1]. The adverts describe customer behavior when they are extra focused on their gadgets rather than on their surrounding environment, such as looking at a phone despite the threat of death caused by accidents which can occur at any time while driving. Regarding today’s online life, when the sharing of informa- tion on social media is not accompanied by attentive behav- ior, there may be an enormous price we have to pay when dealing with the consequences and potential harm indirectly The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Eunil Park . caused by sharing false information. This can even affect the global economic situation such as what happened on Twitter when Barack Obama was rumored to have been injured in an explosion and this resulted in a loss of $130 billion in stock value trading [2]. In 2014, a story about Ebola victims went viral, and even though the news was not true it was still shared millions of times and caused psychological burdens such as anxiety, terror, and falsehood in people’s lives. This kind of ‘‘hoax’’ happens every day in social media, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic [3]. Many of the motives for this are seeking profits for the sake of high network traffic on websites or deliberately causing misleading information to spread in society [4]. As an indication of the extent of this problem, recent studies [5] revealed that around 59% of links on Twitter were shared by users without even reading them. VOLUME 9, 2021 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 83285