Hello everyone! This is Xuhai from University of Washington. It's my great pleasure to present
our work: TypeOut - Leveraging Just-in-Time Self-Affirmation for Smartphone Overuse Reduction.
Although the advances in mobile technology have greatly improved our life, there is a
growing body of research revealing an increasing population with smartphone overuse and addiction.
The overuse may lead to various negative consequences such as distraction,
lack of sleep, anxiety, and depression.
There have been many studies of just-in-time persuasive
technology which intervenes at the moment when overuse is occurring.
Most earlier interventions either block users’ apps/phones or send notifications as reminders,
accompanied by some persuasive content such as app usage duration or reminders of users’ goals.
However, restrictive blocking can create a negative user experience,
and sometimes lead users to relapse after unblocking.
Users may also ignore notification-based intervention, leading to low engagement.
Recently, a just-in-time typing mechanism was proposed to balance restrictiveness and
engagement, where users need to type a series of random digits before accessing the app. However,
the design of the typing content is still under-explored.
In the behavior change intervention domain, self-affirmation exercise is
one of the popular methods that has been proven to be effective. Self-Affirmation
Theory states that reminding users of their internal goals and identities can improve
motivation to maintain users' "self-integrity" with those goals, leading to the behavior change.
It has been leveraged in many domains, such as health behavior change,
academic performance improvement, and well-being promotion.
A typical self-affirmation intervention usually asks users to do self-affirmation tasks,
such as filling out questionnaires, or doing a writing exercise.
However, there is no prior work leveraging self-affirmation in a just-in-time mechanism.
On the one hand, there is a lack of content design for just-in-time typing intervention.
On the other hand, there is an opportunity to equip self-affirmation
with a just-in-time manner. We speculate that these two sides can complement each other.
We created TypeOut, a novel, simple, just-in-time intervention technique that embeds
a brief self-affirmation task into the typing process for smartphone overuse reduction.
Our design consists of two components: first, a typing-based unlock process
that introduces additional interaction costs to decrease the value of phone use.
Second, value-based self-affirmation content that connects users’ personal
value and the overuse behavior to increase the value of non-use.
We developed an Android app to instantiate TypeOut
and conducted a 10-week field experiment to test the app.
Users first set up their own list of value items that are important to them,
and pick the apps for which they want to receive interventions.
Then, when users are trying to access these apps, they need to first type two short sentences
with persuasive content designed based on the Self-Affirmation Theory.
The first sentence is about a value picked from their own item list.
And the second sentence is about what actions they can do
as alternatives to using the phone, which requires in-situ improvisation.
We had a few design considerations when developing the content.
First, our personalized value item list and self-improvisation allow users to customize
the content themselves, leading to a better consistency between their beliefs and behaviors.
Second, for both sentences, we developed more than 20 templates to increase their diversity.
And third, we intentionally frame these sentences in a neutral tone and
use words like "I can" instead of "I should". If users cannot achieve the target behavior,
the neutral tone introduces less threatening to users' self-integrity,
which is imperative for ensuring that users feel safe and not judged through their decisions.
Users can choose to quit the app anytime during the typing, or still access the app after typing.
We released our open-source Android implementation of TypeOut.
To evaluate the effectiveness of our technique,
we conducted a 10-week field experiment that compares TypeOut against two baselines:
The first baseline uses a dialog window showing self-affirmation content, namely content only.
The second baseline asks the user to input random, non-semantic contents, namely typing only.
Each method has one design component of TypeOut,
thus can serve as baselines to evaluate the effectiveness of each component.
We adopted a within-subject design. After a week of data collection with no intervention,
participants used each intervention method for two weeks, with a week of break after
every method to reduce its lasting effect. The order of the three techniques is counterbalanced.
We first compare users' intervention acceptance rate across the three techniques.
When using TypeOut, users would accept fifty-seven percent of
interventions and stop using the apps, which is significantly better than baseline methods.
We then compare users' app usage behavior. We find that when using TypeOut,
users' average app opening frequency was reduced to seventy-three percent
of the opening frequency during the base week when there was no intervention.
TypeOut can significantly reduce more smartphone usage than the two baselines.
We also find similar results from the app usage duration perspective. Compared to that of the
base week, users' average app usage duration was reduced by more than 25% when using TypeOut,
significantly outperforming the other methods.
Moreover, participants’ subjective feedback further suggests that
TypeOut is more acceptable, causes more reflection, and has higher usability.
We also find interesting results when users were asked to pick the
one technique that they thought was the most effective. Surprisingly, an equal number of
participants picked TypeOut and TypingOnly. Our objective measure showed that TypeOut
was clearly more effective than the baseline, but a large proportion of
participants thought the opposite. Our interviews revealed that these
participants picked TypingOnly mainly because it was troublesome. For example, P3 said
"TypingOnly... is boring and painful. So it can prevent me from using the phone too much".
This implies that many users perceive the typing of self-affirmation content to be less interfering
than the typing of random content, which further indicates the advantage of our new technique.
Overall, TypeOut can reduce smartphone overuse effectively and has compelling usability.
To summarize our work. We propose a new intervention technique, TypeOut, for
smartphone overuse that combines self-affirmation theory and the just-in-time typing process.
Our 10-week field experiment indicates that TypeOut can effectively reduce
users' smartphone usage with a positive user experience.
We also envision that our technique can inspire other domains besides smartphone overuse,
where intervention may integrate self-affirmation exercises with an engaging just-in-time mechanism.
Finally, I want to thank my wonderful team for the great collaboration.
I hope everyone stays safe and healthy around the world. I am happy to answer any questions!