User Report

Summary

Mobile phones have become extremely intertwined with human daily-life and our dependence on them only continues to grow. The online world is constantly competing for our attention, leading us to look to our online social spaces for stress-relief, validation, pleasure, and connection, as opposed to seeking out these needs in the real world. We wanted to get a better understanding of how often individuals use their phones and what would motivate them to decrease this number. Our target audience was young adults who want to reduce their screen time and find off-line alternatives to spend that time. We chose to focus on young adults because they are often at a point in their lives where they have the autonomy to partake in off-line events and activities.

We also considered a second problem-space which was centered around creating a more seamless way for individuals to share workouts and fitness goals. However, as we will discuss later in this report, the screen-time reduction problem-space proved to be more well-received.

Methodology

We were in between ideas around reducing screen time and creating community around fitness. As a result, we sent out two surveys - Screen Time Survey & Fitness Survey - to get a better idea of which topic would have more traction. An online survey was conducted because it was a fast and easy method to collect and analyze primary data. We wanted to have insight from a large variety of people and would be unable to collect as much information in such a short time frame through interviews. Because we were surveying peoples online habits, fly on the wall observation wouldn’t work as well because there’s no physical place to observe. Therefore, given our project goals and the time frame we had, a survey made the most sense.

Some key questions for the screen time survey include:

What is your average phone screen time?
What are the top three apps that you spend the most amount of time on?
Is your average screen time higher/lower/about the same as you want?
If your screen time is higher than you want, why do you think that’s the case? What makes you spend that much time on your phone?
If you needed to stay off your phone for x time, do you think it would be more effective to lock your phone in a box and you have the key or your friend has the key? There were many quick questions (MC, Select the following, Quantitative) that made it easy for users to answer while providing us with a lot of information. We also designed some questions to be more qualitative in order to generate more honest and informative responses for topics with more varied and personal answers.

Results

We had 44 responses for the screen time survey and 29 for the fitness survey. We are unsure of the reason for the discrepancy, it could be that some people were more interested in the topic and it could just be that the screen time survey was often the one we sent first when publicizing the survey. Overall, based on the responses to the survey, more people seemed interested in the problem space of screen time usage and indicated that they would use some of our potential solutions.

Of the 44 participants surveyed, 82% within the ages of 19-23
Participants had a median of 5 hours of phone screen time a day. More than 70% of participants reported their screen time is higher than they want. From this, we believe a majority of people want to reduce their screen time.
Participants had already tried a variety of factors to reduce screen time, with all but one participant answering that they had tried at least one method. However, most felt that the methods they had tried were largely ineffective, especially over time.
Social Media is a large factor of screen time. Over 90% of participants reported some form of Social Media as one of the top 3 contributors to their screen time.
Over 80% of participants reported doing another activity as a way to reduce their screen time. This will be put into consideration for our project.
47% of participants answered that their friends knowing their screen time would not reduce it, showing that making this data shareable with friends may not necessarily create social motivation for reducing screen time.
People prefer control in their screen time. While a majority of participants reported that it would be more effective if their friend held the key to unlock the phone, less than 30% would be willing to give the key to the phone if they knew they had to stay off it.

Findings

Activities: The activity that potential users completed was filling out an online survey with 16 questions asking about their demographic information and their screen time usage. These questions were a mix of multiple choice, check all that applies, and short answer, in order to make the survey relatively easy to fill out and lower the barrier of entry to participating.
Environments: We studied the digital environment that users access from their phones. We surveyed potential users on their habits in the digital environment such as the amount of time they spend on their phones, what apps they use the most, and how that makes them feel.
Interactions: We observed the interaction between users’ and their phones and found that users tend to spend more time on their devices than they want to. Additionally, we found that most of their time was spent on social media apps. Users typically desire to spend less time on their phones and more time interacting with the physical world, i.e. interacting with other people or enjoying a hobby. Most users had already tried a variety of methods to reduce their screen time which were unsuccessful.
Objects: Screen time on a phone encompasses all the different apps that the user has on their phone, most commonly social media, streaming, and messaging apps. We also studied the methods that users had tried to reduce screen time: most commonly their phone’s built in time limits for certain apps, turning off notifications, and physically removing themselves from their phone (leaving it behind, giving it to a friend, etc)
Users: The potential users that we surveyed were mainly college students between the ages of 19-23. This is partially because this is the demographic that we are a part of and most of our friends are a part of, so it was easy to recruit participants in this demographic. Moreover, young people who grew up with smartphones tend to struggle with overusing their phones and social media more than older adults.

Takeaways

We found that the majority of our respondents wish they could reduce their screen time and have tried some tool to aid them with that. This supports our original hypothesis that young people want to reduce their screen time, but have not found a successful way to do so. Moving forward, we must consider the ways that we can motivate people to reduce their screen time and encourage them to do something enjoyable and productive offline instead. There are already many tools available to users to help reduce screen time, like screen time limits and different apps. These tend to be easy to ignore/overcome, for example by clicking “ignore” or entering a password, which many users said were ineffective. Some of the solutions we had previously considered were giving your friends control over your screen time limits and/or publishing screen time statistics in order to compete with your friends for lower screen time. However, based on our research, participants didn’t think that their friends knowing their screen time would reduce it and didn’t seem necessarily willing to hand over control over their phone to their friends. Instead, many participants mentioned that having more structure to hang out with their friends or pursue offline hobbies would help them reduce their screen time. Other participants mentioned screen time limits with more “friction” that you could not turn off with just a simple click. Our future designs will incorporate these two concepts in an effort to design a more effective way of reducing screen time. While ultimately, reducing screen time does require some level of intrinsic motivation and discipline, we believe that there are designs that can assist people in their goal to reduce screen time.