Beyond self-tracking and reminders: designing smartphone apps that support habit formation

Stawarz, Katarzyna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9021-0615, Cox, Anna L. and Blandford, Ann 2015. Beyond self-tracking and reminders: designing smartphone apps that support habit formation. Presented at: 2015 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Seoul, South Korea, 18-23 April 2015. CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, pp. 2653-2662. 10.1145/2702123.2702230

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Abstract

Habit formation is an important part of behavior change interventions: to ensure an intervention has long-term effects, the new behavior has to turn into a habit and become automatic. Smartphone apps could help with this process by supporting habit formation. To better understand how, we conducted a 4-week study exploring the influence of different types of cues and positive reinforcement on habit formation and reviewed the functionality of 115 habit formation apps. We discovered that relying on reminders supported repetition but hindered habit development, while the use of event-based cues led to increased automaticity; positive reinforcement was ineffective. The functionality review revealed that existing apps focus on self-tracking and reminders, and do not support event-based cues. We argue that apps, and technology-based interventions in general, have the potential to provide real habit support, and present design guidelines for interventions that could support habit formation through contextual cues and implementation intentions.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics
Publisher:	ACM
ISBN:	9781450331456
Last Modified:	07 Nov 2022 09:55
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/130626

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