After our initial baseline study, the team proceeded to synthesize the observations from both our study as well as our literature review and comparative analysis. We included observations from our pre-study interview, baseline study, and post-study interview.
Technique 1: Affinity Grouping
As a group, each member put sticky notes onto the wall and groups naturally formed as similar observations were placed onto the wall. In order to ensure that similar observations were properly grouped together, team members would regularly consult each other about what each group of sticky notes meant and what the general idea around the group was.
Similar sticky notes were grouped together, but it was possible for sticky notes to move around as different groups were formed. If a team member decided that a sticky note was more related to a separate group, then the sticky note was moved.
For this process, we made the decision to separate observations derived from our study and observations from the literature review and comparative analysis. After a discussion about combining sticky notes from both groups, the team decided that it would be hard to combine observations from these separate groups.
Key Insights and Intervention Study:
From our affinity mapping, we found that there seemed to be two spikes of screen time usage: one during the middle of the day (~12-1pm) and another towards the end of the day (past 9pm). This helps inform when our intervention should take place and also what our intervention should be. Something to consider is that interventions that occur during the middle of the day can be different from interventions that can occur past 9pm.
Another insight we had was that many participants reported social activities that occurred during times that correspond with significant drops in their screen time usage. This suggests that when people are interacting with their friends and family, then wasteful screen time is reduced. We do want to make a distinction between extended screen time usage as a result of communicating with friends and family and scrolling through social media apps. However, we also note that in cases where communication happened through phone apps, then it is possible that some people would pivot to using social media apps as another way of staying connected.
Additionally, we find that we can correlate feelings of being bored or otherwise being unoccupied with screen time usage. We believe that this is a result of how easy it is to open one’s phone and begin the social media scrolling group. As such, we do believe that keeping someone occupied through other social activities is another potential intervention idea.
These insights inform our ideas for our intervention study by identifying times in the day when screen time usage is increased as well as a potential method to help our participants reduce their screen time usage. These points are reflected in Intervention Study idea 1 and 3.
Technique 2: 2×2 Matrix
The second method of synthesis was grouping other existing solutions and intervention ideas from research articles on a 2×2 matrix.
The team decided on Passive x Active for the horizontal axis and Broad x Narrowed for the vertical axis. From our literature review, we found that existing intervention ideas for reducing screen time can generally be categorized as “passive interventions” and “active interventions”. A passive intervention could be seen as turning a phone’s screen to grayscale whereas an active intervention could be setting app limits.
When looking at current existing solutions for reducing screen time, we found that although features and marketing materials did generally suggest that the app was for productivity focused people (students or professionals), there were also apps more focused on a specific group. As such, we wanted to map where these solutions were in regards to their perceived target audience.
Key insights and Intervention Study:
We found from the research that there was no major distinction between the effectiveness of passive and active interventions. However, we did realize that many of the passive interventions suggested in the existing literature can be generalized to “distorting” the phone usage. The most common strategy was setting the phone to grayscale, which distorts the color of the phone screen. As such, we wanted to explore this idea of distortion by introducing the grayscale shift as a potential intervention strategy.
Another insight was that many apps involved the idea of groups. Several apps which had a focus on studying and focus had group study sessions or other ways of having users motivate other users to continue usage. We realized that in addition to our previous insight of social interaction that it could be beneficial to involve some level of social interaction, potentially in the form of increased awareness or accountability to others, in our intervention ideas.
Other key insights we gathered in terms of interventions can be grouped into categories of ways to reduce screen time, visualized on the mind map above. Certain types of mechanisms came to light like creating friction, providing alternatives, harnessing accountability / shame, and generating awareness. Within these categories, we thought of a range of different ideas that vary drastically in simplicity, activeness, and impact. As you can see, our three top intervention ideas, which will be discussed in more detail later, are circled on the mind map.
User Personas and Journey Maps
In order to help narrow our target audience and inform our intervention study, each team member made a persona and journey map which would generalize the most important aspects of their study participants. Our team then voted on 2 personas and journey maps that best represented our target audience. They are displayed below:
Persona 1: Night Owl Nick
Nick represents the typical student whose screen time usage peaks both during the early afternoon and during the night. Nick finds that it is easy to keep scrolling and easily loses track of time.
This persona helps inform us about effective times to intervene to help Nick reduce the amount of time he is on his phone.
Persona 2: Relaxed RJ
RJ represents a student who has tried to limit their screen time usage in the past and wants to continue doing so. RJ is someone who wants to have more time alone, but often spends that time on social media such as Twitter and Instagram despite wanting to spend that time on other activities such as reading and painting.
Rj helps inform our intervention study by showing that more social interaction is not necessarily a solution for everyone. We note here that RJ has plenty of time to be social and instead wants to redirect his screen time towards activities that he feels is more beneficial for his life. We believe that this means that there is opportunity to help encourage individuals to replace their screen time with other activities that do not involve their phone.
Intervention Ideas and Study:
When ideating for our intervention study, we explored several interesting ideas from draining one’s phone battery if an app was used for an extended period of time to forcefully closing an app if a certain usage time limit was passed. Through shared discussion of the ideas and a brief discussion about pros and cons, we came up with the following 4 top ideas.
Our top 4 ideas are as follows
- Grayscale
- This idea would involve half of our users putting their phone on grayscale every night,
- Pros: twice-a-day text reminders are very simple, grayscale setting is simple to do
- Cons: May be challenging to verify if people actually turned grayscale on/off on time, people may ignore texts
- Password Protection
- This idea would involve setting a screen time limit on an app and giving a friend/family member the password for that limit.
- Pros: Password piece requires no involvement from us beyond onboarding
- Cons: Hard to verify that participant’s password was not shared to them after setting, participants may choose friends/family of various levels of closeness (could cause inconsistencies)
- Movement Prompts
- We were wondering if we could prompt users to get up and move around during times when they were on their phones the most. For example, we could send a random text at 12 PM asking them to move 100ft since our data revealed that 12 PM is a peak time for phone use.
- Pros: Very simple (we don’t have to suggest a specific activity besides movement), relatively accessible (our participants don’t need to buy any special resources or be in a specific location to move)
- Cons: Difficult to verify if people actually moved, time and context dependent as people would not want to move at night or during a meeting, many people don’t read their text messages that quickly
- Socialization Pledge
- We considered telling users to stick to a pledge: every time they have a break (like waiting for someone in the dining hall or standing in line at Tresidder), they should talk to someone nearby and confirm (via text to us) that they talked to someone..
- Pros: Requires little involvement on our end, generally accessible (you can talk to people in most locations besides the library), social aspect may have exponential dopamine affect if participants have fun doing it
- Cons: Hard to verify if users actually stuck to the pledge (since we can’t physically be with them all day), people are not always near friends and talking to strangers is very intimidating, we don’t want to abuse people’s break times by assigning them tasks
Discussion and Choosing an Intervention Idea
Our team’s most prevalent idea at the moment is centered around the idea of distortion as a passive intervention. We are considering the grayscale setting, but also other forms of distortion such as audio warping, screen brightness changes, or even manipulations of one’s phone battery. The central idea behind intervention 1 is that we wanted to test whether or not targeted passive intervention could also produce positive effects towards reducing problematic screen usage time similar to when the distortion is permanently set for a period of time. We realized that in the existing literature, the grayscale setting was enabled continuously throughout the course of the entire study. As a team, we do not believe that users would use our app if the distortion was active at all times, so we need to test if and how targeted distortion affects the reduction of problematic screen time usage.
For actual implementation of this idea during the intervention study, there is little difficulty for a user to set up grayscale and that we can target specific times by sending a short text message reminder to the study participants. However, we realize that without being able to directly verify whether or not a participant’s phone was set to grayscale, it is hard to be fully confident of the results. Additionally, we realize that specific distortions could raise accessibility concerns for certain people and as such, such a solution is likely unable to be generalized for everyone in our target audience. For the intervention, we are content with trusting the goodwill of our participants.
Our second idea is about the use of social pressures to help encourage the reduction of screen time usage. By implementing a password system where the user does not know the password and has to ask another person for the password in order to use the app for more than a specified amount of time, we add a large amount of friction for the user. This idea is interesting because we play on social pressures to help reduce problematic screen time usage and this area does not seem to be explored by both existing research literature or other similar apps. However, the amount of friction added could cause users to be frustrated and ultimately delete our solution. Additionally, this intervention could be less effective depending on who the password is shared with and their level of closeness with the user. As such, this is an intervention idea that needs to be tested.
Our last two interventions are of a similar style: prompting the user to do something in order to break a continuous use of their phone. Movement prompts are more specialized for people when they are alone as the prompt would ask them to move around while not looking at their phone. Socialization Pledge approaches this in a different way by prompting the user to talk to someone nearby as the method of breaking continuous phone screen time. Both of these ideas are interesting as in addition to potentially reducing screen time, users can also cultivate a second helpful habit. Since both ideas are similar, they also share a similar problem: activities cannot be done at all times at all places. We realize that if screen time peaks during the late night, it would be inappropriate to send a prompt for users to take a walk outside. Likewise, if a student is the only person in their dorm room, then it is not reasonable to expect them to find someone else to talk to. Since it is easy for users to not participate in these activities, it may be difficult for behavior change to last.
With the considerations presented above, we ultimately decided to create an intervention idea that combined both intervention idea A and intervention B. Throughout our synthesis process, we discovered that people tend to stop using their phones when they either get bored of the experience or suffer physical consequences like dry eyes or migraines. We also learned that people felt social pressure to have less screen time. Our diary study participants that had high screen time levels felt somewhat ashamed and embarrassed when sharing that data with us. As a result, we thought it would be informative to test both screen distortion and social pressure as methods to help people spend less time on their phones. We call this new intervention idea: Grayscale + Password Protection.
Intervention Study Procedure
We are conducting a week-long experiment using a mixture of new and returning participants. We filtered potential new participants using a screener with important questions verifying that they are Gen Z undergraduates at Stanford that use personal smartphones (on which they want to reduce their screen time) and have the time and energy to participate in all components of the study this week.
We will be using an A/B test style. Half of our participants will receive daily text reminders at 9 PM to turn on grayscale and leave it on for the rest of the night. Each morning, they will receive a text reminder to turn off grayscale after they brush their teeth. The goal of this study is to see if people’s screen time decreases at night and stays the same as usual during the day. This way, we hope to test our hypothesis that screen distortions like grayscale are truly helpful in lowering phone usage. The other half of our participants will be asked to choose an app on their phone that they’d like to spend less time using. Then, they must set a screen time limit for that app that is 50% less than the time they usually spend on it. Finally, they must ask a friend or family member to password-protect this screen time limit so that they must ask that friend or family member for the code in order to unlock the app. We hypothesize that the social pressure of not wanting to admit to a friend or family member that you want to ignore your screen time limit will motivate people to keep that limit in place.
In terms of data collection, we will end the week by asking participants to send two weeks worth of screenshots of their screen time data from the screen time feature in their iPhone’s settings. Then, we will compare the two weeks to see if screen time reduced in the ways we had hypothesized. We also plan to debrief this data with each participant through short interviews at the end of the week so we can get further detail as to how they felt during the process.
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