Reading time: 2 minutes – Spotted on Futurism
What if the solution to spending less time on your phone was to want to smash it against a wall? Researchers are convinced of this. And to reduce your daily screen time, they decided to create a very special application.
InteractOut, as it is called, disrupts the very use of your device by disrupting basic gestures, such as swiping or tapping the screen. Not enough to stop you from using it, but just enough to frustrate you, describes the Futurism site.
Presented at a conference dedicated to human/computer relations (the “Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference”), which took place in Honolulu (Hawaii) in mid-May, the study conducted by engineers from the University of Michigan and dedicated to this app is clear: InteractOut is very effective.
It would even be much more so than other methods, such as locking certain applications after a given time of use, for example. According to researchers, these sneaky and annoying disruptions are 16% more effective in reducing users’ screen time.
At the end of the article, you will put down your smartphone
“Lock apps are quite disruptive, so if someone is in the middle of an important task or game, they will look to bypass the screen timer”says Anhong Guo, co-author of the study and professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. “Then people may forget about the time limit and spend more time on the phone than they wanted”he explains in a press release.
To drive you crazy and push you to put down your phone, the application adds, for example, a delay between the moment you press a button and the triggering of the action on the screen, a latency time which can quickly become irritating . It also shifts the location of your actions, so where you tap on the screen doesn’t match what your device detects.
According to the team of scientists behind InteractOut, the application allows everyone to become aware of their use of the smartphone and to move away from mechanical use. “If we continually add a little bit of friction to the interaction with the phone, the user ultimately becomes more aware of what they’re doing, because there’s a disconnect between what they expect and what’s really happening”, concludes Anhong Guo. And if this allows some people to cure their addiction to small screens by putting them down (or throwing them out the window), then so much the better.
