We present and evaluate the concept of winds -- micro challenges to be done in the physical world post-smartphone overload, to encourage exiting the digital smartphone tunnel and promote refreshing breaks from the digital realm. Whereas digital detox solutions are unsustainable in everyday life, current everyday interventions such as screen time reminders or app blockers can induce negative feelings in users. We hypothesize that winds, delivered by our mobile app Real-World Wind, promote balance between the user’s physical and digital activities, as well as engagement with the intervention. RWW tracks users’ smartphone use behavior and distributes winds of five categories upon overload pattern detection. We evaluated the effectiveness of RWW in a week-long field study with 25 participants. Our findings show that winds foster a fun and engaging experience, and significantly promote balance between the digital and physical world post-smartphone overload. We discuss implications for future technology overload interventions.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642583
Amidst the increasingly prevalent smartphone addiction, we introduce StayFocused, a mobile app to help people focus on their tasks at hand by reducing compulsive smartphone use. Besides guiding people to set focus sessions for non-screen time, we incorporated reflective prompts probing individuals' phone-checking intentions whenever they check their phones and a chatbot to deliver these prompts. To examine the effects of the reflective prompts and the chatbot support, we designed three versions of StayFocused: baseline, reflection, and reflection-chatbot, and conducted a stage-based between-subjects study with 36 college students over five weeks. We found that participants who received the reflective prompts were able to focus longer and resist distractions, and those with chatbot support seemed to better maintain their smartphone use reduction. By highlighting how participants reflected on their focus session activities and their preferences for the chatbot, we discuss the implications of designing persuasive conversational interfaces to reduce unintended behaviors.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642479
YouTube remains a site of problematic persuasive media consumption, often overriding the goals of users when on the platform. In resistance, we present Attention Receipts - artifacts that materialize the cost of being persuaded by the engagement driven design of YouTube. We design and build a browser plugin and a receipt printer that helps users critically reflect upon their time spent watching videos on YouTube. In a 3 week field-deployment with 6 participants, we evaluate how the materiality of the receipt and their agency in the reflection process affect both the quality of reflection and the time spent consuming media. We find that the materiality of the receipts positively influences time spent consuming internet media and that users were split on having agency over when and how they reflect upon their screen-time. We conclude with design recommendations for domestic artifacts that utilize materiality to reveal the effects of persuasive technology.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642505
Smartphone overuse is hyper-prevalent in society, and developing tools to prevent this overuse has become a focus of HCI. However, there is a lack of work investigating smartphone overuse interventions over the long term. We collected usage data from N=1,039 users of one sec over an average of 13.4 weeks and qualitative insights from 249 of the users through an online survey. We found that users overwhelmingly choose to target Social Media apps. We found that the short design frictions introduced by one sec effectively reduce how often users attempt to open target apps and lead to more intentional app-openings over time. Additionally, we found that users take periodic breaks from one sec interventions, and quickly rebound from a pattern of overuse when returning from breaks. Overall, we contribute findings from a longitudinal investigation of design frictions in the wild and identify usage patterns from real users in practice.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642370
Smartphone overuse poses risks to people's physical and mental health. However, current intervention techniques mainly focus on explicitly changing screen content (i.e., output) and often fail to persistently reduce smartphone overuse due to being over-restrictive or over-flexible. We present the design and implementation of InteractOut, a suite of implicit input manipulation techniques that leverage interaction proxies to weakly inhibit the natural execution of common user gestures on mobile devices. We present a design space for input manipulations and demonstrate 8 Android implementations of input interventions. We first conducted a pilot lab study (N=30) to evaluate the usability of these interventions. Based on the results, we then performed a 5-week within-subject field experiment (N=42) to evaluate InteractOut in real-world scenarios. Compared to the traditional and common timed lockout technique, InteractOut significantly reduced the usage time by an additional 15.6% and opening frequency by 16.5% on participant-selected target apps. InteractOut also achieved a 25.3% higher user acceptance rate, and resulted in less frustration and better user experience according to participants' subjective feedback. InteractOut demonstrates a new direction for smartphone overuse intervention and serves as a strong complementary set of techniques with existing methods.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642317