Does Longer Phone Use Always Feel Worse? Examining How Intention and Duration Shape Evaluations of Time Use

Paper Title

Does Longer Phone Use Always Feel Worse? Examining How Intention and Duration Shape Evaluations of Time Use

Publication Info

• Topic area: Smartphone usage evaluation based on intention and duration.
• Keywords: Smartphone use, time-use evaluation, intention, session duration, digital well-being, problematic smartphone use, subjective evaluation, screen time, habitual use, entertainment.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing research often assumes that longer smartphone use is inherently negative, but lacks detailed empirical evidence on how session duration and user intentions jointly influence subjective evaluations of time use.
• Significance: Understanding these dynamics is crucial for designing interventions that promote healthier and more satisfying smartphone use.
• Motivation and related work: Prior studies have focused on screen time as a proxy for problematic use, correlating it with negative outcomes like procrastination and reduced well-being. However, they often overlook the role of user intentions and fail to capture the nuanced, moment-to-moment evaluations of smartphone use.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A screen-based research method that collects annotated screenshots to analyze smartphone session duration, user intentions, and subjective evaluations of time use.
• Novelty:
  1. Introduces a method to capture continuous, fine-grained data on smartphone use, overcoming limitations of fragmented experience sampling methods.
  2. Examines how session duration and user intentions interact to shape subjective evaluations.
  3. Identifies distinct evaluative trajectories for different usage intentions.
  4. Reveals the heterogeneous nature of "no specific intention" use, challenging its traditional framing.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Developed an Android app to collect annotated screenshots and contextual data.
  • Participants labeled screenshots with intentions, urgency, time-use evaluations (good, bad, neutral), and habitualness.
  • Analyzed over 6.1 million screenshots and 73,000 sessions from 104 participants over two weeks.
  • Categorized phone sessions by duration and examined how evaluations varied across intentions and elapsed time.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Positive evaluations of time use decline and negative evaluations rise during the first 40 minutes of a session but stabilize thereafter, with long sessions predominantly judged as neutral (up to 70.9%).
  • Evaluative trajectories vary by intention:
    • Functional use: Positive evaluations decline steadily; negative evaluations remain rare.
    • Information-seeking: Positive evaluations increase initially, then decline slightly, with minimal negative judgments.
    • Entertainment: Positive evaluations decline steadily; neutral and negative evaluations rise, but very long sessions are often judged neutral.
    • Connection: Messaging-based use resembles functional use, while social-media-based connection sees steeper declines in positive evaluations and higher negative judgments.
    • No specific intention: Evaluations unfold in three phases—short sessions judged positively, mid-length sessions viewed negatively, and long sessions predominantly neutral.
• Advantage over baselines: Challenges the assumption that longer use is inherently worse, showing that evaluations stabilize into neutrality rather than escalating negativity. Highlights the importance of intention in shaping evaluative outcomes.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Participants annotated screenshots from their smartphone use over 14 days.
  • Data included 6.1 million screenshots and 73,000 sessions.
  • Sessions categorized by duration and analyzed for intention-specific evaluative patterns.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Privacy concerns may have influenced participants’ behavior.
  • Reflective labeling may have altered usage patterns.
  • Potential underestimation of negative evaluations for long sessions.
  • Single-intention labeling may overlook mixed or nuanced experiences.
  • Limited to a single country and Android users; generalizability may be constrained.
  • Future work could explore multimodal analysis of screenshot content and expand to other devices and cultural contexts.

Summary

This study examines how smartphone session duration and user intentions jointly shape subjective evaluations of time use. Positive evaluations decline and negative ones rise early in a session but stabilize into neutrality for longer durations. Evaluative trajectories differ by intention, with functional and information-seeking use generally seen as more positive, while entertainment and social-media-based connection are more prone to negative judgments. "No specific intention" use unfolds in three phases, from positive short sessions to neutral long ones. These findings challenge the assumption that longer use is inherently worse and highlight the importance of intention-aware interventions for promoting digital well-being.