Abstract
Users can nowadays take advantage of Digital-Self Control Tools (DSCT) to self-regulate their usage of applications and websites by means of interventions like timers and lockout mechanisms. However, DSCTs mainly focus on the interaction between users and a single device at a time, while people typically use more than one device, and in a concurrent way. This motivates the need of exploring tools that can adapt to multi-device settings. We present FeelHabits, a DSCT that allows users to set up, through a novel approach, multi-device intentions, i.e., contextual time and launch limits for the simultaneous and/or alternating use of the PC and the smartphone. Stemming from the defined intentions, FeelHabits employs different levels of severity to warn the user about a reached limit on the currently used device. A preliminary study on 7 participants suggests that FeelHabits might be effective for reducing some multi-device behaviors, and opens the way for further research.
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Notes
- 1.
https://nodejs.org/en/, last visited on October 29, 2020.
- 2.
https://firebase.google.com/, last visited on October 29, 2020.
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Acknowledgment
The authors wish to thank all the anonymous participants of our study, and the MSc student Elia Bravo for developing the FeelHabits prototype.
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Monge Roffarello, A., De Russis, L. (2021). Towards Multi-device Digital Self-control Tools. In: Ardito, C., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12935. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85610-6_8
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