An Exploration of Rules and Tools for F...

Smartphones play an in­creas­ing­ly large role with­in our lives, shap­ing our in­ter­ac­tion with friends and family mem­bers. Though smartp­hones fac­i­li­tate seam­less com­mu­ni­cat­ion, there is a grow­ing con­cern that peop­le over­use smart­phones in front of family mem­bers, which can some­times de­ter­i­o­rate family re­la­tion­ships. We re­port on a sur­vey ex­am­i­ning smart­phone usage among three types of family members: child­ren, part­ners, and other ad­ults liv­ing in the house­hold. We ex­a­mine the rules and tools that they use to re­duce their smart­phone usage. Re­sults show that peop­le have many rules to limit their co-located smart­phone usage. How­ever, the rules vary wide­ly be­tween the three types of fam­ily mem­bers. Further­more, par­ti­ci­pants re­ported a lack of smart­phone-based tools to help them re√duce smart­phone usage. Con­sid­er­ing these re­sults, we suggest re­com­men­da­tions for de­sign­ing smart­phone-based tools in­tend­ed to help re­duce co-located smart­phone usage with­in families.