App- and feature-level smartphone interventions to reduce time spent in mobile social media applications

Abstract

Many built-in and third-party tools have been developed to help people reduce their time spent on mobile social media applications. These tools allow them to track their usage time and set limits for the target social media application. Nevertheless, one social media application might provide different functionalities (e.g., contacting friends, uploading images or videos, watching the news from joined groups) that the user goes through during the app usage. Despite growing research in intervention design to self-regulate social media use and fine-grained usage analysis, little is known about the effectiveness of app(coarse-grained) and feature(fine-grained) level smartphone interventions. We designed and implemented app- and feature-level smartphone interventions in this work. To explore the effectiveness of our intervention design, we conducted a field study with 61 participants over 16 days after dividing them into the app- and feature-level intervention groups. Our intervention design consists of three phases: baseline collection, self-reflection, and restricted usage. The results showed that restrictive interventions assisted in reducing social media use for both groups, while self-reflection alone was ineffective. Moreover, the app-level group benefited more from self-reflection than the feature-level counterpart.