Psychological Effects of Technology on Human Development

Areas of Interest & Focus:

My top three areas of interest were the Psychological and Developmental Effects of Technology, Neuroscience, and Machine Learning. The domain I chose was the Psychological and Developmental Effects of Technology. I believe this a subdomain of learning and education. I have always been interested in how technology has positively affected humans but along with those positive effects come negative effects as well. I want to learn how technology can negatively affect growth in the different developmental cycles of humans.

PEST Analysis:

Political — There is a lot of political support for making sure younger generations have a relatively good experience with technology and on the internet.

Economic — It can increase the amount of business with companies that analyze internet usage among different age groups.

Social — It will promote better usage of technology and the internet.

Technological — It can be in the form of a phone application.

Competitive Landscape:

Because there are a number of different developmental cycles in humans, I will be focusing on the area that has the highest concentration: children to young adults. Generally, this means that the best way to observe the effects of technology and the internet on children would be applications that let parents monitor their children. There are several of these: DinnerTime, K9 Web Protection, MamaBear, Screen Time, and a few more. They all allow parents to either look at how much time their children spend on different applications, control their usage to certain applications, or both. My application would be a web application that could be used on either desktop, laptop, or mobile devices. It wouldn’t restrict the usage of any applications but rather look at how much time is spent on each and also tracks what the user is doing in the application (if possible). The administrative users can then view the data to analyze what the user was doing. The data can be used to see what effects the application usage has the user afterwards as well.

What People Say:

Since I am making a phone app, it would be most wise to ask questions about smartphone usage. The benefit of doing user interviews would be to figure out what kind of features would be useful for my app. I’m sure there will the typical response of being able to monitor and restrict other app usage but there could be some specific features that I have not thought of. I think that user interviews will also provide a good platform to start on in terms of features. If I build it myself without any feedback, it could be great in my eyes but lacking for any user that tries to use it. In that case, the app would be useless and no one would use it.

My Questions:

1. Do you think your smartphone is useful or detrimental in your day-to-day activities?
2. What do you spend the most time doing on your smartphone?
3. If you could see how much time you spend on different apps day-to-day in one place would that be useful?
4. If you limit your smartphone usage would that increase or decrease your productivity?

I interviewed people in the age group between 12 and 30 since that is the age range where smartphone usage is the highest. Out of the people that I asked, most said that their smartphone was useful in their daily lives because of how much they are able to do with a click of a button. Social media was the activity that people spent the most time on (seemed obvious). All the people agreed that being able to see their daily usage would be very useful. One pointed out it would be very useful as long as it didn’t impact how long their phone battery lasted (this is a good feature to look at; minimizing battery usage). The last question had interesting responses. Sometimes having a distraction on your phone is a good way to pass time. At the same time, there are hundreds and hundreds of apps on smartphones that increase productivity. Most of the interviewees said that limited smartphone usage on an app-by-app basis would be the best way to help with productivity. Controlling notifications seemed like the most common response in how to deal with distractions versus productivity on a smartphone. Notifications seem like the biggest way that a smartphone causes a distraction or a “break” in productivity. Figuring out a way to filter notifications for individual users without asking them if they want to mute a specific notification each time is a very interesting but difficult feature to create (perhaps with the use of machine learning?).

Final Product:

I help those that want to improve their productivity or simply see how much their technology impacts their life through the usage of a monitoring and controlling smartphone application. The unique benefit of using my application compared to those already on the market is that it makes use of battery usage to monitor time spent on different applications as compared to timing the usage of each individual application. This way, not only is battery life preserved, the application uses data that all smartphones already collect. On top of this, my application also allows the controlling of different notifications so that users will not necessarily have to give up all usage of applications on their phone. They will be able to control notifications so that if they get something that is extremely important, they will still see it.

The User’s Journey:

First, the user will get an introduction to the app and the reason why it was created. It will then ask the user to register by email (or use Apple/Google sign in) to store information about the user. Next, the user will then be able to view their daily application usage for the day sorted by time (can also change to be alphabetical; ascending/descending). Each application can be clicked on to set notifications settings for manually. For example, if the user clicks on “Instagram” they will get a new window that shows the different type of notifications that “Instagram” sends and they will be able to control both the type and how often they get those types of notifications.

Product Structuring:

Wireframes are a way to view or “canvas” what your application should look like. They are beneficial because they give you a design to work towards with whatever design framework you are using. It’s good to have an outline that you can get feedback on before you actually build the application.