Hi i'm Nadja and welcome to our talk MindPhone: mindful reflection at unlock can reduce
absent-minded smartphone use. Together with my colleagues Luke Haliburton, Philipp Greiner,
Albrecht Schmidt, Heinrich Hussmann and will Ville Mäkelä, we executed the project
at the LMU Munich in Germany as well as the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Smartphones have become an essential part of life -- they are always with us, widely available
and easily accessible. Smartphones have created many positive effects
that are perceived by many people as a blessing. However, other people report the excessive amount
of screen time, constant interruptions or lack of meaning in smartphone interaction to have
become a curse. As a result, people increasingly desire to change their smartphone use behavior
whether it be reducing screen time or using their smartphone for the right reasons.
Dugas and colleagues addressed this dualism by differentiating between general and absent-minded
smartphone use. Whereas general smartphone use describes the organizational power of smartphones,
absent-minded smartphone use behaviors such as compulsive checking, pointless scrolling or other
phone use without a specific purpose is more closely linked to inattention in daily life.
Our aim is to support people in choosing to reduce their absent-minded phone use,
while empowering them to continue using it as a powerful tool. We present an approach which differs
from related work by placing an intervention at the actual moment of smartphone use .
This is in line with the concept of in-the-moment awareness related to mindfulness.
We take an approach close to Ellen Langer and define mindfulness as focused attention
on the present activity with full awareness of the context in which it is happening.
This includes awareness about intentions and purpose for a certain present activity.
With that in mind, we designed and developed MindPhone: a smartphone app that confronts the user
with one of two questions at smartphone unlock. The first question draws upon previous research
on meaningful smartphone interaction as well as on research on asking about the intention
of using an application or website. In contrast to prior work, the second question revolves
around users intended activity in the real physical world after their smartphone use.
We named the two questions intention and activity and phrase them as follows:
Why do you want to use your phone right now? on the left hand side and What activity do
you want to do after you finish using your smartphone? on the right hand side on the slide.
We also build upon previous works suggesting that writing down thoughts sparks a more profound
reflection. Hence MindPhone offers two reaction modi: passive and active. In passive mode, users
mentally contemplate about the intention or activity question answer,
whereas in the active mode, users have to write their response in text.
Our work is driven by the mindfulness premise of concentrating on the present moment holistically,
in the digital realm as well as in the physical space surrounding it. As such, we sought to design
a solution that sparks in the moment reflection and focuses on the whole of the present moment,
in order for users to be able to evaluate their behavioral patterns up front.
At that point users, and not MindPhone, can autonomously decide to stop behaviors such
as absentminded and phone use of developing in the first place. To this end we set out to investigate
the influence of the differences in our approach by the means of the following two questions:
First does reflection prior to smartphone use on the real world activity or smartphone use
promote mindful smartphone use patterns? and second, does smartphone use differ
based on whether users mentally reflect or write down their reflections prior to smartphone use?
We conducted a mixed method study collecting screen time, unlocks, absentminded smartphone
use questionnaires course or the SUQ-A scores by Dugas and colleagues
and also qualitative feedback and surveys. We set out to send the participants a survey
at the beginning of the study, after each condition and then after MindPhone use ended.
This spread over four weeks, including a two-week field deployment of MindPhone.
We did the study with 28 participants, who were assigned in two groups,
based on receiving either the intention or activity question. So, we ended up with 15
participants in the intention group and 13 participants in the activity group.
We found that the real world activity question significantly reduces smartphone use
while encouraging users to return to the real world.
The intention question raises awareness of reasons for smartphone use.
Both the active and passive answer modi induce reflection and awareness but it is highly
personally dependent on which of these two modes the user preferred: some participants enjoyed the
active writing more as it added another barrier to smartphone use which can further aid in taming
compulsive phone checking. On the other hand, some participants did not liked exactly that.
Although quantitative measures of smartphone use increased after stopping the use of MindPhone ,
participants point to a shift in thinking towards smartphone use.
For example, "I barely opened my phone for no reason because I didn't want to write my reason
into my phone. That led to the fact that I used my phone only for useful and reasonable things ."
Rather than thinking on reducing screen time by solely focusing on the device, our participants
reported of being more aware of the real world the device is embedded in.
"It's nicer that this app motivates you to think
outside your phone. I was surprised that I started to reflect more on my daily actions.
I can't say if i was more productive or so, but I definitely spent more time outside of my phone."
Our overall results show the potential for a non-corrective smartphone intervention at unlock,
that raises awareness of people's smartphone use as well as their surrounding physical world.
In particular the latter was effective in reducing screen time, number of
unlocks and absent-minded use. People obtained additional benefits in their smartphone use,
demonstrated in their statements on experiencing more mindful smartphone use and tugging their
phones away to experience the world around them. Thus we discuss three points: 1)
the potential of including the real physical world in similar smartphone use interventions; 2) the
need for personalization of smartphone and broader technology use interventions, such as letting the
user decide which mode to use (in our case) or with what frequency the intervention should act
and, finally, we show the need for a change of mind: instead of smartphone use reduction as end goal,
we propose life-technology balance. With life-technology balance, life and technology
live happily together as long as real life behaviors do not suffer under technology use.
Thank you so much for listening.