Exploring Design Opportunities for Reflective Conversational Agents to Reduce Compulsive Smartphone Use

Abstract

Conversational agents (CAs) have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Recognizing the potential of CAs being persuasive agents, we are interested in leveraging CAs to reduce compulsive smartphone use, a widespread behavior among young adults that can lead to negative consequences. This work presents the design and development of StayFocused, a mobile app incorporating a chatbot to assist people in setting focus goals and reflecting on their phone-checking behaviors in situ. Particularly, we highlight the iterative process of curating prompts for GPT-3, and the lessons learned from our trials and errors. With StayFocused, we propose a three-week between-subjects study with college students. We envision the design of StayFocused and the proposed study will deepen our understanding of how CAs support immediate actions as well as sustained behavior change, and inform the design of persuasive technologies for reducing unintended behaviors such as compulsive smartphone use.