Understanding User Contexts and Coping Strategies for Context-aware Phone Distraction Management System Design

Abstract

Smartphones are often distraction for everyday life activities. In this work, we envision designing a context-aware system that helps users better manage smartphone distractions. This system design requires us to have an in-depth understanding of users' contexts of smartphone distractions and their coping strategies. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the contexts in which users perceive that smartphones are distracting in their everyday lives. Furthermore, prior studies did not systematically examine users' preferred coping strategies for handling interruptions caused by smartphones, possibly supported by context-aware systems that proactively manage smartphone distraction. To bridge this gap, we collect in-situ user contexts and their corresponding levels of perceived smartphone distraction as well as analyze the daily contexts in which users perceive smartphones as distracting. Moreover, we also explore how users want to manage phone distraction by asking them to write simple if-then rules. Our results on user contexts and coping strategies provide important implications for designing and implementing context-aware distraction management systems.

MindPhone: Mindful Reflection at Unlock Can Reduce Absentminded Smartphone Use

“…respectively. This way people might not only feel encouraged to leave their phones, but also might gain deeper insights into the everyday contexts in which they use their smartphone [16,20]. In the following subsection, we outline the importance of personalization to implement MindPhone, or a similar solution, for use in everyday life.…”

“…to a user's context of use. However, it is difcult to accurately determine smartphone use contexts in order to automatically deliver personalized solutions, as they are highly individual [16,20]. Future work could thus try to match diferent setups of MindPhone to predicted, intervention-needing use [42,43].…”

Poster: Exploring User Contexts and Needs for Context-aware Smartphone Distraction Management

“…We developed a mobile ESM app for sampling users' in-situ context (i.e., location and activity) and perceived smartphone distraction (5-point Likert scale) [2]. We conducted field data collection and collected 9,180 ESM responses from 34 participants (10 females; mean age = 22.37, SD = 2.43) during three weeks.…”

“…Considering individual differences is more critical than just considering users' contexts. There are many user contextual factors relevant to perceiving smartphone distraction, such as states of engagement, which was identified in our earlier work [2]. Therefore, building a recognition-based system for context-aware distraction management may be challenging.…”

“…This work addresses the opportunity of context-aware distraction management by supporting a rulebased system with improved expressivity. This poster summarizes our prior work [2] and discusses future research directions.…”