Establishing Mini Habits with Habitive

Establishing Mini Habits with Habitive Thomas Derleth

Stuttgart Media University Nobelstrasse 10 70569 Stuttgart, Germany

[email protected]

Merle Hiort


Dennis Jonietz


mh266@[email protected] stuttgart.de Marc Stauffer Christopher Uhrig



[email protected]

[email protected]

ABSTRACT

best to avoid procrastination. According to the Statistics Brain Research Institute only 8% of people achieve their New Year’s resolutions. But these resolutions are mostly defined by complex general statements like ”Lose weight” and ”Getting organized”, which are the two most frequently mentioned tasks from the year 2015 [21]. In contrast to such common personal goals, current time management and leadership courses use the acronym SMART to define achievable goals [12]. By corresponding to this acronym, an objective should be describable by five attributes:

Establishing habits in one’s daily life is a difficult task. Therefore so-called Mini Habits are becoming more popular in order to evolve into a self-fulfilling prophecy. This paper presents Habitive, a minimalistic smartphone and smartwatch app to establish Mini Habits by using a social auditory reward system. An exploratory case study approved the concept and the e↵ectiveness of the social auditory reward system for overcoming procrastination regarding the execution of the participant’s specific Mini Habits.

• S pecific

Keywords

• M easurable

Mini Habits; habits; procrastination; auditory reward; user experience design; smartphone; smartwatch

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• A ttainable • R ealisable

INTRODUCTION

• T ime bounded

We are what we repeatedly do. ” Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.“

Because it seems to be so hard to establish the habits that are necessary to reach these complex personal goals, a new form emerged better known as Mini Habits. Since there is no general definition for the term Mini Habit, we evolved a new definition based on the five SMART principles. We refer to a Mini Habit if following criteria are met:

Aristotle

This quote from the Greek philosopher Aristotle is way older than 2000 years – but habits seem to be a more present topic than ever. In the last years, a lot of books regarding the topic were published, which explain the importance of the skill of building habits (e.g.[2][8][13]). Habits are generally defined as ”tendencies to repeat responses given a stable supporting context” [14]. Though there is a challenge: building a habit approximately takes 66 days [9]. And there is one more fact that should not be overlooked: to establish a habit one must actually do the new habit and try his

• Time: The duration it takes to perform the habit should be a maximum of three minutes. • Context: The habit should be practicable on a regular basis. A regular basis in this case means, that the person who is trying to establish the habit should be able to perform it at least once a day. • Active: The habit should be articulated in an active sentence. The user has to make a definite decision at the respective situation, if he wants to perform the Mini Habit or not. Therefore, the person should choose something he or she wants to do, and not something to avoid doing.

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An example in regard to the given definition would be the following: ”Every morning I will do my bed.” The Mini Habit

c 2016 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-2138-9. DOI: 10.1145/1235

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only takes a very short amount of time to accomplish, it represents an activity which one can probably do every day and the person has to actually make a positive decision. The main goal of this paper is to answer the question, if one can establish Mini Habits by using a habit app with an social auditory reward system. Furthermore we want to evaluate, if the social auditory reward system motivates users to overcome procrastination and if the app is more suited for a smartphone or a smartwatch as a device. Hence we present Habitive, a smartphone and smartwatch app designed to establish Mini Habits in a new and fun way. Over the course of 14 days we executed an exploratory case study, in which five participants tested the app and reported on their experience and success. The same test procedure was repeated with five more participants, who tested the app for three consecutive days. We discuss how e↵ective our approach for establishing Mini Habits really is and if the chosen social auditory reward system helps in overcoming procrastination.

2.

Figure 1: Screenshots of the application’s user interface: Apple Watch version (left) and smartphone version (right) strength of one code base. The performance of the web application was sufficient for our use case, therefore di↵erent native versions were not required. Due to the possibility of the smartphone to add bookmarks to the home screen, we ensured a similar experience compared to a native app. To keep the experience consistent there are just slight di↵erences between the Apple Watch version and the web application in regard to the user interface.

MATERIAL AND METHOD

Within the shorter past quantified self-started to get an upcoming trend [18] and people begin to think about their daily habits. Nowadays you can find a wide range of tracking apps in the market which help to improve, optimize or analyze the daily life. Those applications cover many different areas such as sports, health, finances, working life or nutrition.

Another key aspect was the interaction with the app. Therefore the e↵ort should be kept as small as possible by limiting the duration of the interaction needed with the app. Our design goal was a simple and easy to use user interface. In the smartphone version four buttons divide the screen vertically and horizontally (see Figure 1). Each of the buttons represents one of the Mini Habits the user chose to establish.

Although they di↵erentiate through varying reward systems, they have one thing in common: each application focuses on one specific use case. Likewise it should be noticed that these reward systems are mostly pursuing an impersonal approach. The language learning app Duolingo [3] for example uses a don’t-brake-the-chain mechanism by counting how many days in a row the users have learned their vocabulary. And the to-do list app Wunderlist [5] contains a reminder function to motivate the users to complete their tasks. Herein Habitive di↵ers: through the concept of the application it serves a wide range of use cases, which are suitable for all elements of the daily routine. Moreover its key element, the personal auditory motivation, brings a new reward system to light. This new approach to getting a reward uses group e↵ects within a community to motivate each user to stick to the specified goals.

Due to the fact, that there is no browser on the Apple Watch, we decided to fall back to a third party app in order to use Habitive on the smartwatch. It was of utter importance to us, that the smartwatch app behaves in the same way as the smartphone app. In order to achieve this, we used Workflow, an iOS app from the public App Store [1]. Workflow enables you to build your own work-flows as shown in Figure 2. The work-flow communicates with the web application’s backend to receive and track all relevant data. The user interface of the smartwatch version is similar to the smartphone version. As demonstrated in Figure 1, a total of four buttons, each representing a specific Mini Habit, are implemented to track progress on a Mini Habit.

The key focus of Habitive was to ensure a user-friendly solution which requires a minimum of e↵ort by the user himself in order to keep the time of interacting with the device as small as possible: just one click. Besides, improving yourself requires an intrinsically motivation born out of selfawareness of your bad habits. Therefore our approach gives the users the possibility to choose their individual habits within our recommendations.

2.1

Through the di↵erent colors of the buttons as shown in Figure 1, we aimed to empower the user to recognize the right button easily and eventually remember the Mini Habits by color after some time. By clicking a button and thereby tracking the progress on a Mini Habit the device plays a randomly chosen voice message. These audio files were recorded by each participant in advance of the test phase and represent our social audio reward system. The voice messages were limited to be shorter than three seconds and should include a funny or motivational quote. To guarantee a realistic scenario, every participant was free to record anything they wanted. Because every user is part of a community, it is allowed and recommended to record personal messages

Material

The application is available as a web application for the smartphone and as a version for the smartwatch Apple Watch. Using a web application enabled us to provide the application to di↵erent platforms and operating systems on the 2

than on the quantitative test data itself.

2.2.1

Participants

A group of ten persons participated in this study. Five out of these ten participants were members of the research team, who decided to perform a self-experiment. All participants are aged between 20 and 30 years and are currently studying at a university or working as young professionals. According to the classification by Sinus-Milieus shown in figure 3, all test persons could be related to the group of adaptive pragmatists. This field is described as ”modern young center of society” that behaves ”motivated [...], ambitious, [and] flexible” [19]. Being in line with this definition, all of them aimed to establish Mini Habits into their daily routine to overcome bad behavior and therefore looked forward to their individual e↵ects of this case study. One of the participants mentioned for example: ”I want to use the app to improve my daily routine. With Habitive, I need to invest less than half an hour per day and get a reward every time I do a Mini Habit”. Only some of the participants already used comparable tools like the sport app Runtastic [16] or the to-do list app Wunderlist [5], but never an application that is similar to Habitive.

Figure 2: Screenshot of the Workflow App configuration used in Habitive to connect track the progress of a Mini Habit and communicate with the application’s backend as well. These voice messages were partly exchanged during the test phase, to keep up the user’s curiosity for new audio messages. It must be admitted that by randomly playing voice messages there is a possibility that one sound is played twice in a row when tracking Mini Habits. Simplicity was the main focus in the design phase of the app, which is reflected by the fact that checking in one habit is the only possibility of interaction with the app. Consciously a complex navigation and other operable elements were avoided, based on our assumption that establishing a Mini Habit requires willpower and that the interaction with the application therefore should be as little as possible. Using smartphones and wearable devices enables the app to be omnipresent and allows Mini Habits in a wide variety of contexts. This fact and the guidelines for defining a Mini Habit lead to a realistic objective for each user.

2.2

Figure 3: The social and target group classification by the Sinus Institute [19], according to which Habitive users can be related to the group of adaptive pragmatists.

Method

2.2.2

The study has been based on a case study, a commonly used research strategy in a variety of areas. Case studies in general examine ”a phenomenon in its natural setting, employing multiple methods of data collection to gather information from one or a few entities (people, groups, or organization)” [15]. Furthermore the definition emphasizes that the study doesn’t need any experimental control from the researching team. For this study an exploratory approach has been followed, which aims to observe the action and thereby gain insights and generate hypotheses for new research. It focuses on understanding the phenomenon ”through the participant’s interpretation of their context” [15]. Therefore the main interest in this study lies rather on qualitative feedback based on the participant’s experiences with the social auditory reward system and their suggestions for improvement,

Procedure

There were two di↵erent kinds of test phases due to the fact that the five research team members had participated for 14 days, whereas the other five participated for three days. Despite the di↵erent duration, both test phases followed the same procedure, which consisted of four di↵erent steps: introduction, execution, reflection and retrospective. Two among the five team members were using Apple Watches as their test device, while the other eight persons tested the application on their smartphone. Phase 1 - Introduction Each external participant has been assisted by a responsible research team member. In advance of the test phase, each assistant introduced the procedure and the questionnaires 3

practical straightforward human simple inventive creative innovative motivating captivating connecting brings me closer to people presentable pleasant attractive premium good

for the data collection to his participant. Besides, the assistant helped the participant with defining his four personal Mini Habits following the recommendations provided in section 1. Phase 2 - Execution The second phase was the test process itself, in which the test person should perform each habit at least once a day. During this time the participant has never been supervised or manipulated by the research team, due to the main principle that Habitive should be used out of an intrinsic motivation. The time stamp and type of the habits were tracked by the application as described in section 2.1. At the end of each day, the test person had to fill out a questionnaire which aimed to portray their daily experiences. The questionnaire contained seven questions which were answered by choosing numbers on a scale from one to five. Also, the daily questionnaire provided an optional comment field for further feedback on the general experiences. The user initially rated the interaction during the execution, and subsequently his curiosity for the auditory feedback and whether he liked it or not. Additionally, the participant was asked whether the application motivated him to do his habits and if he would had done them without the app as well. Lastly, the participant evaluated the e↵ort of using the app by answering the question on whether the auditory feedback received was worth using the app.

impractical cumbersome technical complicated conventional unimaginative conservative discouraging dull isolating separates me from people unpresentable unpleasant ugly cheap bad

Table 1: Selected pairs of the customized AttrakDi↵ evaluation method [22]

the participant was asked whether he already used similar applications, how he would rate Habitive in comparison to these, and what his first impression of Habitive was like. In the following, the participant should comment the voice messages in general and whether he preferred messages from known or unknown other participants. Besides, the test person was asked whether he would like to record voice messages himself, if there existed situations in which the sound was perceived as distracting and if he would prefer other media as a reward, for example GIFs or images, instead of sound. Furthermore, we asked if the user felt motivated by Habitive to do his Mini Habits and what kind of improvements he would suggest. Lastly, he was asked whether he would like to continue using the app after the testing phase and whether he would recommend Habitive to other people.

Phase 3 - Reflection In the third phase the test person was advised to answer a scientific questionnaire, developed by the User Interface Design GmbH research team led by Marc Hassenzahl [22]. This evaluation method aims to evolve an overall judgment of the attractiveness of an interactive product with 28 questions and metrics from one to seven. Besides the pragmatic quality (which defines if the product helps the user to reach his aims), especially the question of the hedonic quality (which defines if the user liked to use the product) forms the focus of this method. By choosing this kind of evaluation we get an impression of how a user exactly feels during the process of using and after the usage of Habitive. For this case study, we customized the AttrakDi↵ questions suchlike as to emphasize the simplicity of Habitive. For this purpose we decided to eliminate some of the given word pairs like cautious and bold, which would only distract the participants from the more essential parts. Thus we were able to get a version of the AttrakDi↵ consisting of 16 word pairs that can be seen in Table 1. The results of the AttrakDi↵ gave us a first summary of the user’s experience with the app. As stated in section 2.1 it was especially important for us to create a prototype that is easy to use.

Phase 4 - Retrospective One of the secondary research questions is whether a change in behavior can be manifested after a shorter period than 66 days [9]. For this purpose a fourth phase, the retrospective, was performed. One month after completion of the test phase a quantitative survey was conducted to evaluate how many of the Mini Habits were still executed daily without the use of the application. Only the five research team members took part in this retrospective.

3.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In the following chapter we present the results of our study and discuss our findings. These are based on the questionnaires, the AttrakDi↵ as well as the data gathered in the process. We investigate reasons for and against the tested devices and evaluate how the app influenced the participants’ behavior. The main goal is to provide confirmatory evidence, that our prototype including the social auditory reward system supports the establishment of Mini Habits.

Subsequently, the participant was asked a second and more personal questionnaire by his assisting research team member, who recorded the answers in writing. This questionnaire aimed for deeper insights on his feelings during the usage and consisted of twelve questions and one optional field for further comments. The main objective was to get a qualitative counterpart of our quantitative studies that were already evaluated through the customized AttrakDi↵. Besides, we aimed to encounter possible suggestions for improving the application as well as a better understanding of the behavior of the innovative reward system. In this questionnaire,

Even though all participants answered the same questionnaires, we will only consider the daily answers of the 14-dayparticipants for a quantitative analysis. The daily rating of our three-day-participants was not representative in conse4

quence of the short application of Habitive. Nonetheless the AttrakDi↵ and the questionnaire after the test phase were evaluated from both test groups, because even the shorter test phase gave valuable feedback for a qualitative analysis on the user’s experience when using Habitive.

3.1

All of our participants would recommend the app to friends, only one person limited his recommendation ”especially to a younger audience, who are used to mobile devices”. Also, the AttrakDi↵ shows that Habitive follows an innovative concept. The app was rated with a value of 1.75 in the category inventive - conventional and with a value of 1.9 for the word pair innovative - conservative, accentuating the idea to present a new way for supporting the process of establishing an Mini Habit. The result of 2.65 in the comparison of isolating - connecting indicates a positive feeling of working together when getting auditory feedback from your friends. This point will be discussed more precisely in section 3.5.

General impression

The AttrakDi↵, which was conducted with our participants after the test phase, provides an overview on the participant’s overall experience in regard to the application of Habitive. Figure 3 shows the results of the AttrakDi↵ visualized in a matrix. The matrix is divided into nine squares, each representing a specific characteristic. The blue square shows the result for Habitive. The vertical position of the blue square describes the hedonic quality of the app. In the same way, the horizontal position represents the pragmatic quality.

Altogether the AttrakDi↵ confirmed our idea of a simple and nevertheless valuable app to support the establishment of Mini Habits. The positive average rating (without any negative value) represents the high acceptance of the app by all participants. The next section provides a more detailed look at the questionnaires and the actual execution of the Mini Habits by the participants.

As mentioned in 2.2.2, we omitted some of the given word

3.2

Mini Habits

Our participants were required to choose their habits with the help of the definition described in the Introduction. This facilitates a comparison between the di↵erent Mini Habits. Even so there was a wide variety of habits, which we analyzed and categorized in order to get further insights on the behavior of our participants. Moreover we wanted to evaluate the given definition for Mini Habits and improve it upon the results of the test phase. In total, there were 15 di↵erent Mini Habits in our study. These can be divided into six categories. Namely these categories are Health / Fitness (5), Household (4), Knowledge (3), Food (2), Job (1) and general behavior (1). Approximately 30% of all habits are in the group Health / Fitness, which reflects the trend of sport and fitness apps [4]. If we add the group of Food -habits to this consideration, the number increases to almost 50% of all Mini Habits. Obviously it is important to many people to improve their personal fitness and health. This insight might provide a basis for further analysis in the field of Mini Habits or modifications to Habitive.

Figure 4: The classification of Habitive in matrix of pragmatic and hedonic quality based on the results of the AttrakDi↵ evaluation method [22]

In order to get another view on the results of the Mini Habits, we associated the habits with the respective participants. Our goal was to find di↵erences in the number of clicks the user did for each habit. As a click represents an execution of a Mini Habit, this factor shows a direct connection between the type of habit and the likelihood of working on it. The investigations showed that the average clicks per habit are much more dependent on the user, than on the habit itself. We found di↵erences when multiple users worked on the same habit, e.g. Do 10 Push-ups. This led us to the conclusion, that the personal motivation to improve yourself is more important, than the habit one is working on. Also, due to this fact we came to the conclusion, that it is necessary to evaluate each participant individually, because the motivation of each individual participant varies from day to day and is not comparable to other participants.

pairs in the AttrakDi↵ in order to customize it for Habitive. Even though the omitted word pairs were set to a neutral value of 0 when creating the matrix, the app achieved a positive result in respect to the hedonic and pragmatic quality, as shown in Figure 4. All of our ten participants referred to Habitive as ”simple, innovative and motivating” and that ”one needs to spend less e↵ort than in other apps.” These statements are confirmed by the strongest results of the app’s evaluation, namely the word pairs simple - complicated, innovative - conservative and motivating - discouraging. On the scale from one to seven, where the lower value is a more positive feedback, Habitive achieved an overall average of 2.5, underlining the goal of a simple and enjoyable, but also valuable app. 5

As the test phase started in December, the participants had an obstacle in their way: Christmas. It was important to us to test Habitive under realistic circumstances. Christmas time seemed like an interesting test environment for the Mini Habits of our participants - especially for the groups of Health / Fitness and Food. Our users couldn’t keep their motivation up and do their Mini Habits in comparison to the pre-Christmas time. Everyone of them told us, that ”it’s hard to keep working with the app if you’re not in your regular everyday life”. Moreover many defined Mini Habits weren’t even practicable during the holidays. If one is outside the daily environment (e.g. vacation with family) one might not even have the chance to choose between the stairs and the escalator and the Mini Habit will become impracticable. This was also mentioned by our participant Alex, who said that ”it is especially hard to work on new things, if you’re not in your everyday life”. Although Christmas seemed like a realistic everyday obstacle for our study, we conclude that the definition for the Mini Habits has to be delimited in regard to such situations. If the participant has no opportunity to work on the chosen habits, the use of Habitive is also limited.

Figure 5: Comparison of the answers to the questions ”How strongly has Habitive influenced your motivation to do your Mini Habits today? (dots; 1 = low influence, 5 = strong influence) and ”Would you have done the Mini Habits without the support of Habitive?” (squares; 1 = not likely, 5 = very likely) from the daily questionnaire

This leads us to the point of choosing a valid Mini Habit. In our definition of Mini Habits on page 1 we defined them as context-specific. When comparing the di↵erent habits the participators worked on, only three of them were tied to a more or less specific context, like use stairs instead of escalator. These habits were clicked an average of 5.5 times per Mini Habit in contrast to 12.3 clicks for Mini Habits throughout the trial period, which were not tied to a specific context. This supports our idea to choose a daily executable Mini Habit. Otherwise, the establishment of the Mini Habits is influenced negatively, as discussed in section 3.3.

habits. This becomes especially interesting compared to the blue graph (squares), which represents the motivation to execute the Mini Habits without the app on the respective day. It almost never crosses the middle of the scale, underlining the strong influence Habitive had on the motivation of the participants. As highlighted by one participant on the sixth day of the test phase, he ”only did the Mini Habits because of the app”. Another eye-catching characteristic of Figure 5 is the similarity of the two curves. Except of the beginning of the test phase, the motivation line stays higher than the other one, but both of them have very similar peaks and lows. There seems to be a correlation between the motivation of the users and their belief, that they do not need the app anymore. In times when they were more motivated to work on their Mini Habits, they also felt like they do not need Habitive. Although the app sometimes seemed somewhat dispensable, it supported the participants in times of low motivation.

Another interesting point is the number of Mini Habits we predefined in the app. We chose the amount of four Mini Habits on our own assessment, because there is no literature on this topic yet. According to one participant this concept must be investigated again, because ”it’s hard to focus on four di↵erent Mini Habits at the same time”. The participant also expects ”the process of establishing the habits [to] take a longer time span”, if one tries to establish four habits at once. Considering this argument, more studies are required to investigate the time it takes to establish di↵erent amounts of Mini Habits simultaneously and to provide a solution to this question.

We want to take a closer look at the individual correlation of the app and it’s influence on the execution of a Mini Habit, because we only examined the average ratings yet. A pattern, which we found in many participants, is shown in Figure 3.2 from day six to nine of one participant. Even though the participant gave the lowest possible answer to the question ”Would you have done your Mini Habits without Habitive today? (1 = never, 5 = yes, of course)”, he gave a very high answer to the question ”Would you have done your Mini Habits without Habitive today? (1 = never, 5 = yes, of course)”. As we already mentioned, daily motivation varies from person to person. Habitve must be able to motivate the user on such days to ensure, that they keep making progress on the establishment of the respective Mini Habits. The presented data confirms this assumption. Therefore Habitive seems to be an e↵ective solution to support the process of establishing Mini Habits, which will be examined in detail in the following section 3.3.

Nonetheless the positive influence on changes in behavior by using Habitive is apparent. The daily questionnaires showed that many participants would not have work on the Mini Habits without the app, as illustrated in Figure 5. It shows the average rating of the answers for the questions ”Would you have executed your Mini Habits without the app today? (squares; 0 = not likely, 5 = very likely) and How would you rate your motivation towards doing your Mini Habits today? (circles; 0 = low, 5 = high). The graph for the motivation (circles) represents the general desire to improve the Mini Habits. It has a positive average of about 3.2 with many days almost achieving a value of 4, indicating that the participants were motivated to work on their

6

Day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Participant Marc Question A 4 4 4 4 2 5 4 4 4 3 4 3 4 4

Question B 4 4 4 4 3 1 1 1 1 3 3 3 3 3

Figure 6: Daily average rating of the participant’s answers regarding the question ”How would you rate your curiosity towards new audio messages today?” (1 = low, 5 = high)

Table 2: Answers to the questions A ”How strongly has Habitive influenced your motivation to do your Mini Habits today? (dots; 1 = low influence, 5 = strong influence)” and B ”Would you have done the Mini Habits without the support of Habitive?” (squares; 1 = not likely, 5 = very likely)”

3.3

Figure 6. It demonstrates the average answer for the question How curious were you for the new messages? from the daily questionnaire as described in 2.2.2. In the beginning, the testers were curious for the sounds, because they did not know most of them yet and liked the auditory reward. One participant mentioned ”the funny jokes and insiders, that could also trigger group dynamics” and another participant thought the messages were ”a funny idea and a good motivation to work every day”. It can be seen that the longer the test phase endured, the less curious the participants have been. This is particularly interesting because new messages, that were added by the participants during the testing phase, did not seem to have a big influence on this. But on the contrary they told us, that they were more motivated when they knew that there are new messages in the system. This seems to be another contradiction between the behavior and the answers of the participants and could be examined by further studies.

Establishment of Mini Habits

The long-term goal of Habitive is to help the user with establishing and keeping his Mini Habits. Therefore the time after our study is particularly interesting, because it shows whether the concept as a whole is working or not. Therefore we included a retrospective as fourth phase as described in 2.2.2. In the time between the testing phase and the retrospective phase, the prototype of Habitive has not been used, but we kept observing the behavior of the five research team member participants. The figure to the question Would you do your Mini Habits without Habitive today? (see Figure 5) declines in the end of the test phase. But as of four weeks after our test phase all of the participants of the research group are still doing an average of two to three of their four Mini Habits even without using the prototype anymore. That indicates more than 50% of the total Mini Habits they were working on. According to this fact the question arises, why the the answers during the testing phase did not fit to the actual behavior after the testing phase of our participants.

But if we take a look at the fast adaption of the new Mini Habits by our participants again, the falling curiosity makes more sense. Apparently they were subconsciously not as curious as they thought when answering our questionnaire. This underlines the concept of Habitive being a quiet supporter in the background. It seems as if the participants in general underestimated the application’s influence on their development, but this didn’t seem to smaller the e↵ect of it at all. Habitive worked as a supporting app and did what it was supposed do: to help the users with establishing their Mini Habits.

Even though nine out of ten testers told us that they would ”continue to use the app after the test phase, if there would be minor changes”, none of them believed in a positive result after only two weeks. In our research before the test phase we also found studies explaining it takes a period of 66 days [9] before a habit will be established completely in somebody’s lifestyle. Our study contradicts this result by showing an establishment of Mini Habits even after only two weeks of training. Because of the short test period and our small test group, we recommend more detailed studies to get a profound knowledge on this topic.

3.4

Comparison Smartphone and Smartwatch

For our research we tested the application on two di↵erent types of devices. While eight study participants used a smartphone, only two people used the smartwatch version of Habitive. Due to this fact, the analysis in this part will be focused mainly on the qualitative feedback. This part is dedicated to di↵erentiate between the di↵erent devices and the resulting impacts regarding the user experience of Habitive.

Another interesting result is the decreasing curiosity about the new voice messages of the other participants as shown in 7

The testers using the smartwatch faced one technical obstacle while using Habitive: additionally to the smartwatch, a smartphone had to be in range to communicate via Bluetooth. This was necessary, because when the participant tracked his progress on the smartwatch, the sound was played on the smartphone due to technical limitations of the Apple Watch as described in 2.1. The second reason for this connection is that the Apple Watch cannot establish its own internet connection, which was necessary to pass the data to the application’s backend. As we learned from the interview with the two participants who used the smartwatch version, this obstacle can be neglected, because they did not have any issues fulfilling this requirement. Nevertheless we recommend using more appropriate devices for further studies. Figure 7: Comparison of the smartphone and smartwatch group’s average rating to the question ”How time-consuming would you rate the interaction with the app today? (1 = very low, 5 = very high)” from the daily questionnaire

The two participants who used the smartwatch version had little experience with the Apple Watch in advance. Nonetheless, the interaction with the smaller displays did not influence the beginning of the test phase. As demonstrated in Figure 7, in the first three days of the test phase the group using the smartwatch even rated the usage e↵ort lower than their counterparts with the smartphones. After the first three days, the estimated e↵ort to interact with the app was also rated lower or equally except for day four.

every participant in the study, excluding the research team itself, liked the idea of the sound reward. Since the social auditory reward system represents Habitive’s unique selling proposition, we argue that this is the reason why the app was rated as innovative and inventive in the AttrakDi↵. The consistently positive rating to the second question of daily questionnaire ”How would you rate your curiosity in regard to new audio messages today?” as shown in Figure 6 lays the foundation to the success of Habitive.

In conclusion it can be said that the wearable may in some cases have advantages over the smartphone, though the effort for using the app with a smartwatch or a smartphone only shows minor di↵erences. In detail, the result shows the following: depending on the custom property of the Mini Habit such as place of performance, situation and activity, either the use of the wearable or the smartphone is more suitable. In some situations they are equally fitting. If one is in a situation in which the phone is difficult to grasp, the wearable seems to be more appropriate. If the smartphone is easy to reach, it is better suited due to the larger display. Here, however, no clear boundary can be drawn. As you can see in Figure 7 no big di↵erence in e↵ort was rated by the participants using the smartphone in comparison to the participants using the Apple Watch, which substantiates the argument that the e↵ort is defined by the custom property of the Mini Habit. According to the argumentation we conclude, that both versions are viable in respect to the individual context of the Mini Habits, even though the smartwatch achieved a slightly better result.

3.5

Curiosity can generally be ”seen as an intrinsically motivated desire for information” [10]. If we define motivation as ”the study of why people think and behave as they do” [6], the curiosity for new auditory sound rewards a↵ects and initiates the motivation needed by the participant to execute the Mini Habit. Consequently, by executing the Mini Habits on a daily basis, the process for the establishment of the Mini Habits is triggered. This three step process is closely related to the popularized Habit Loop mentioned by Charles Duhigg in his 2012 book called ”The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business” [2], which is based on studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers in 1990 [20]. The Habit Loop, as shown in Figure 8, is divided into three steps: a cue, a routine and a reward. The cue (e.g. a person is bored) represents a specific contextual trigger that starts the negative routine (e.g. getting a co↵ee even though he or she doesn’t feel tired) in order to get a reward (e.g. being occupied by drinking co↵ee). The social auditory reward system and therefore Habitive is present in two steps of the Habit Loop: the cue and the reward. As previously described, the curiosity for the auditory sound reward sets an active cue to start a positive routine in order to get a sound message as a reward. But Habitive is not supporting the actual execution of a Mini Habit, which has to be done by the user alone. Nonetheless, Habitive in combination with the social auditory reward system turns out to be a valuable technological companion and supporter in establishing Mini Habits, as already examined in section 3.3.

Social Auditory Reward System

The social auditory reward system represents the uniqueness of Habitive in the field of habit apps. The establishment of Mini Habits as well as this part reflects the main focus of our study. The following section discusses, how e↵ective the social auditory reward system turns out to be and if it is a valuable alternative to support the user in overcoming procrastination for the predefined Mini Habits. As literature states, getting a reward for completing a task has a positive influence on the human attitude towards the execution [7]. Based on this scientific background we designed our social auditory reward system for Habitive. As shown in the answers to the final questionnaire, 100% of the participants within the three-day test group and therefore

After examining the e↵ectiveness of the social auditory reward system, we take a deeper look into the question, what makes a good audio reward. Six out of ten participants 8

Figure 8: Habitive

Mini Habits and therefore to overcome procrastination, because ”rising up to [...] challenges requires not only physical endurance and talent, but also psychological strength” [11]. Hence it can also be argued, that it has a strong influence on the establishment of Mini Habits. The auditory reward is not only an extrinsic motivator, but even more an intrinsic motivator. As Deci and Ryan state ”[e]xtrinsic motivation is a construct that pertains whenever an activity is done in order to attain some separable outcome. Extrinsic motivation thus contrasts with intrinsic motivation, which refers to doing an activity simply for the enjoyment of the activity itself[...]” [17]. As described in section 2.1, it is a main goal of Habitive to be used out of an intrinsic motivation. The intrinsic motivation is accelerated by social factors. These social factors, which ”are generally perceived as supportive of one’s feelings of [...] relatedness will have a positive impact on one’s motivation” [11]. The participants of the three-day group did not know every participant of the research team in person, who actually recorded the sound messages. All participants of the three-day group agreed on the fact that the e↵ect of the voice messages was particularly motivating, when they were recorded by people they know in person. The data confirms our assumption, that the social factor plays an important role in the auditory reward system of Habitive.

The Habit Loop in combination with

stated that the biggest problem occurring in the test phase was the possibility to receive the same audio message twice. This is especially interesting in regard to the psychological background in the last paragraph. Getting the same audio reward twice might in some cases reduce the value of the reward for the respective participants. Therefore the next time using Habitive, they might not be as motivated to do the Mini Habit as they would have been receiving a new audio message every time. However, one participant said that he would like to have to possibility to save audio rewards he liked. This underlines the fact that some audio rewards are worth hearing twice to the user, while others are not. This observation needs further investigations, as we cannot make any definite conclusions with the data collected in this study.

Besides, we want to provide some additional findings in regard to the di↵erent devices used in this study. Comparing the smartwatch to the smartphone testing group, there are no di↵erences regarding to the social auditory reward system. As explained in section 2.1, the smartwatch group had to face some technical issues due to the required Bluetooth connection. For future work it might be useful to consider the di↵erent screen sizes of the devices if experimenting with di↵erent media formats in regard to the reward system.

Besides the positive arguments there is a downside regarding the auditory rewards: for some people it is inconvenient to play the sound files in public places. It either disturbs other people around or the ambient noise is just too loud to understand the audio message. Two out of ten persons mentioned this problem in the final questionnaire. One participant stated that ”it is hard to understand something in the subway without earphones.” Another participant complained that he always needed to ”search for a place where [he] can listen to the audio without being disturbed.” This problem is closely related to the context of the respective Mini Habit. At home there is no obstacle to playing the auditory reward after executing a Mini Habit. In public places the user might not play the sound due to inconvenience and therefore might forget to track his progress later on. Due to the fact that we designed Habitive to provide an instant reward after executing a Mini Habit, an alternative media format might be reasonable. As we expected this result in advance, we asked the participants in the final questionnaire, if they would rather receive other media formats (e.g. GIFs, videos or pictures). According to our data, ten out of ten participants confirmed this assumption. This leads to a new question: do the participants actually like the sound reward itself or are they more interested in the audio messages, because they were recorded by close friends?

In conclusion, the social auditory reward system had a strong impact on the success of Habitive and the establishment of the Mini Habits. The similarity to the Habit Loop (Figure 8) as well as the social factors are important parts of Habitive. A version of the app with di↵erent media formats might underline the mentioned social factor. Though, this need further investigations. Furthermore it might be scientifically valuable to examine, if the social factor can be enhanced by providing a notification for a user who recorded a voice message, stating that the user succeeded in motivating someone else to do his Mini Habits.

4.

CONCLUSION

Based on the findings of our quantitative as well as qualitative analysis we argue, that Habitive and the social auditory reward system are valuable for establishing Mini Habits. The retrospective showed that all participants of the research group integrated at least half of their Mini Habits into their everyday life - while still having a positive user experience in the process. The duration for the establishment of the Mini Habits stands in conflict with the previously mentioned 66 days [9], since we reached a success rate of above 50% of the chosen Mini Habits in only 14 days. Another essential point is the social auditory reward system, which received positive quantitative as well as qualitative feedback, and helped the users to avoid procrastination when perform-

The social factor of Habitive seems to play a key role regarding it’s positive rating received by the participants. This social factor seems to influence the motivation to execute the 9

ing their Mini Habits. The smartwatch might be the right device for presented use case, though further investigations are recommended due to the low amount of actual users.

[12]

For more detailed insights, the presented study should be repeated with a larger user base and more di↵erent user groups in regard to the Sinus-Milieus [19]. Thereby it is possible to evaluate, if the shown concept is equally e↵ective for more people in general. Furthermore, we recommend improving the system by adding an app-internal upload functionality for audio files in order to evaluate, how many user would actually contribute audio files on a regular basis. Due to the technical challenges regarding the Apple Watch and the consequent necessity for having the smartphone nearby to play the auditory rewards, we also recommend to test the smartwatch app on a similar Android device.

[13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

All in all, our study leads to the fact, that the shown kind of technology is beneficial for establishing Mini Habits and overcoming procrastination. The conducted study provides a valuable basis for further analysis in the field of behavioral change in combination with innovative technology in order to support the process of striving for human excellence.

5.

[17]

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