Abstract
Smartphone overuse can lead to a series of physical, mental and social disturbances. This problem is more prevalent among young adults as compared to other demographic groups. Additionally, university students are already undergoing high cognitive loads and stress conditions; therefore, they are more susceptible to smartphone addiction and its derived problems. In this paper, we present a novel approach where a conversational mobile agent uses persuasive messages exploring the reflective mind to raise users’ awareness of their usage and consequently induce reduction behaviors. We conducted a four-week study with 16 university students undergoing stressful conditions—a global lockdown during their semester—and evaluated the impact of the agent on smartphone usage reduction and the perceived usefulness of such an approach. Results show the efficacy of self-tracking in the behavior change process: 81% of the users reduced their usage time, and all of them mentioned that having a conversational agent alerting them about their usage was useful. Before this experiment, only 68% of them considered such an approach could be useful. In conclusion, users deemed it essential to have an engaging conversational agent on their smartphones, in terms of helping them become more aware of usage times.
Highlights
Millions and millions of hours are spent on smartphones, making these devices the most popular Wireless Mobile Devices (WMD), due to their pocket size and accessibility
We present a mobile app that collects usage data and sends it to a conversational agent
Implementation and evaluation of an app that achieved an average smartphone usage reduction of 81.3% in all experimental subjects
Summary
Millions and millions of hours are spent on smartphones, making these devices the most popular Wireless Mobile Devices (WMD), due to their pocket size and accessibility. Since companies’ success can be measured by the time spent by their customers using their products, software designers compete for their users’ attention. This motivates them to keep working on attention retention strategies and applying psychological principles as much as possible in software design [6]. The logic behind this is simple: the greater the number of users, the greater the number of accesses to their apps, resulting in more ingenious opportunities for companies to gather the attention of their apps’ users and monetize their products [7]. Smartphone users tend to underestimate their usage [8,9], when it could be increasing due to these attention grabbing techniques, which shows a lack of awareness of the time they spend each day on their smartphone
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