I am excited to share that the our poster “Romadoro: Leveraging Nudge Techniques to Encourage Break-Taking” was accepted to the 34th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST). In our poster, we present a Chrome plugin designed to encourage healthy break-taking through the implementation of technology-mediated nudges [1] coupled with the Pomodoro Technique [2]. The extended abstract and poster introduce our user study designed to test the effectiveness of technology-mediated nudges with the Pomodoro Technique.
Our abstract is as follows:
Excessive screen-time has negative impacts on mental and physical well-being, and taking breaks is important to keeping creativity, interest, and productivity high. We developed Romadoro, a Chrome extension that uses the Pomodoro Technique and technology-mediated nudges to promote better break-taking practices. Nudges involve designing choices to predictably alter the behavior of users. To test the effectiveness of using technology mediated nudges together with the Pomodoro Technique on break-taking, we conducted a mixed design user study with 36 participants. The findings from our study indicate that nudge techniques have a significant impact on motivating users to take breaks. Our work demonstrates potential avenues for designing time-management apps that could be more beneficial to the users than the classic Pomodoro approach.
Interested readers can find the camera-ready extended abstract here, the poster here, and a short video explanation of our poster here. The UIST 2021 conference will take place globally in a virtual format due to the Coronavirus pandemic, between October 10-14th, 2021. I am very excited that what started as a class project has now resulted in my first publication! I am looking forward to attending the UIST conference for the first time this year!
References
[1] Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. 2009. Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Penguin Books.
[2] Francesco Cirillo. 2009. The pomodoro technique. Creative Commons.