Good vibrations

TLDR

Digital overuse on mobile devices is a growing problem in everyday life. The study presents a generalizable mobile intervention that uses nudge theory and negative reinforcement to generate subtle, repeating phone vibrations to nudge users toward reduced digital consumption. The mechanism involves issuing gentle vibrations every five seconds when a user exceeds a set daily limit, ceasing once the user leaves the app. A three‑week controlled experiment with 50 participants showed daily digital consumption fell by over 20%, though the effect did not persist after removal, and qualitative feedback highlighted increased awareness of app usage and design implications for contexts such as education, sleep, and work, advancing HCI understanding of curbing digital overload.

Abstract

Digital overuse on mobile devices is a growing problem in everyday life. This paper describes a generalizable mobile intervention that combines nudge theory and negative reinforcement to create a subtle, repeating phone vibration that nudges a user to reduce their digital consumption. For example, if a user has a daily Facebook limit of 30 minutes but opens Facebook past this limit, the user's phone will issue gentle vibrations every five seconds, but the vibration stops once the user navigates away from Facebook. We evaluated the intervention through a three-week controlled experiment with 50 participants on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform with findings that show daily digital consumption was successfully reduced by over 20%. Although the reduction did not persist after the intervention was removed, insights from qualitative feedback suggest that the intervention made participants more aware of their app usage habits; and we discuss design implications of episodically applying our intervention in specific everyday contexts such as education, sleep, and work. Taken together, our findings advance the HCI community's understanding of how to curb digital overload.