Informative Keyboard and its Application to Raise Awareness of Smartphone Use

Excessive smartphone use is now widely considered a personal and societal problem. It is recognized by application and smartphone makers, who provide tools to track the amount of use, set limits, or block certain services at predefined times. These tools, while powerful, may require significant cognitive effort to operate: configuration parameters need to be set, and captured statistics need to be analyzed. To offer a complementary solution, we propose a radically different approach. We employ the keyboard of a smartphone as an output device. With each press of a key, the user is given a high-level, qualitative, color-encoded estimate of the amount of recent smartphone use. The technique, dubbed the informative keyboard, is a case of implicit interaction: the user's intention is to enter text but, while typing, they receive the feedback. In the paper, we elaborate the concept, identify design decisions, describe our implementation, present the outcome of a questionnaire-based evaluation, and point to some other applications of the informative keyboard.