Background

This year, there is an estimate of 6.3 billion smartphone users worldwide (Number of Smartphone Users From 2016 to 2021, 2021). Ever since the smartphone was introduced, they have allowed us to connect, navigate, communicate, and entertain ourselves in an endless amount of new ways. Although many of these changes can be considered positive, it does not come without its problems. A study by Harwood et al. (2014) showed that higher smart-device involvement can be linked to both higher depression and stress rather than having a positive effect on the users’ lives. There have also been studies finding a relationship between smartphone addiction and decreased work productivity (Duke & Montag, 2017).

One approach to solve this issue has been to design apps meant to improve our lives through building new habits and increase productivity. Although many apps have tried this in different ways, there is a debate on how high the efficiency of these apps is. According to Stawarz et al. (2015), some of the main issues are the lack of theoretical grounding as a basis for the apps and a lack of evaluation on these apps by researchers. They also explain that many of the apps on the market rely on sending the users notification reminders to perform the habits. This can help the user repeat the behavior but comes with the issue that it can hinder the development of automaticity and make the user rely heavily on technology to perform their habits.

We, therefore, aimed to create a widget-based habit formation app that relied more on nudging the user to a behavioral change than using alarms and reminders. Nudging can be described as introducing subtle design choices that are supposed to guide the user towards desired choices and behaviors (Caraban et al., 2019).