During 10-12 October 2022 at the World Conference on Mobile, Blended and Seamless Learning (mLearn), the full paper “Effect of social support features via buddies in app-based habit building” was presented. The paper will also appear in the mLearn 2022 proceedings.

The authors of the paper are Daniel Biedermann, Patrick Schwarz, Jane Yau and Hendrik Drachsler. The abstract is as follows:

App-based habit building has been shown to be a good tool for building desired habits, however it is unclear how much individual features that are present in many apps contribute to the success of habit building. In this paper, the authors consider the influence of social support features by developing an app in which habit progress was shared with peers. In the study, 38 participants created habits and monitored their progress regularly with the app over three weeks. The participants were divided into a control group without a companion, and a treatment group cohort, in which they were assigned to each other based on their desired habit. With each habit repetition, the app gave feedback on the number of repetitions and the automaticity of the user’s habit. The results obtained show that the reproduction of app-based intentional habit building is effective and that automaticity could be predicted by habit repetition.