Xuhai Xu
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States
Smartphone overuse is related to a variety of issues such as lack of sleep and anxiety. We explore the application of Self-Affirmation Theory on smartphone overuse intervention in a just-in-time manner. We present \projectname{}, a just-in-time intervention technique that integrates two components: an in-situ typing-based unlock process to improve user engagement, and self-affirmation-based typing content to enhance effectiveness. We hypothesize that the integration of typing and self-affirmation content can better reduce smartphone overuse. We conducted a 10-week within-subject field experiment (N=54) and compared \projectname{} against two baselines: one only showing the self-affirmation content (a common notification-based intervention), and one only requiring typing non-semantic content (a state-of-the-art method). \projectname{} reduces app usage by over 50\%, and both app opening frequency and usage duration by over 25\%, all significantly outperforming baselines. \projectname{} can potentially be used in other domains where an intervention may benefit from integrating self-affirmation exercises with an engaging just-in-time mechanism.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517476
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)