InteractOut: An App to Limit Your App Time

University of Michigan researchers’ InteractOut app works to manage screen time by delaying a phone’s swiping and tapping functions and forcing users to think harder. This makes it easier for them to consider whether to keep scrolling. Watch this video to learn more.

“Lockout apps are pretty disruptive, so if someone is in the middle of an important task or a game, they’ll scramble to skip through the screen timer. Then, they can forget about the time limit and spend more time on the phone than they wanted to,” said Anhong Guo  , U-M assistant professor of computer science and engineering and the corresponding author of the study.

Transcript

00:00:00 you are someone that you want to reduce overuse and it's the tool that's not effective enough to support you to do [Music] that you know smartphone overuse is a problem right we know that and there are current interventions such as uh you set your timer um let's say an hour for these apps collectively and then once you reach

00:00:35 that timer then you will pop out notification you can ask one more minute 15 more minute or skip for the rest of the day right so that's pretty common um but a big problem is that when it is too annoying or becomes too frustrating you just stop using it but the idea of our project is that once you reach the timer we manipulate the user's input such as like we add a little bit of delay to our

00:00:59 tab uh where we set an offset to our tap so we have to tap a little bit below to trigger what is on top of it um or when you when you swipe uh we will make it slower or we will have to reverse the direction so but basically these manipulations have the effect of just adding a little bit friction [Music] when the app forces you out you feel

00:01:34 that you're not in control right you are forced out but when it's interacti that give you this friction uh when you stop using it you feel that you decided to stop using it now the app forced you to stop using it and this level of user agency will make you feel better to stop using your device