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Behavior change systems help people manage their time online and achieve many other goals. These systems typically consist of a single static intervention, such as a timer or site blocker, to persuade users to behave in ways consistent with their stated goals. However, static interventions decline in effectiveness over time as users begin to ignore them. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of static interventions to a rotation strategy, where users experience different interventions over time. We built and deployed a browser extension called HabitLab, which features many interventions that the user can enable across social media and other web sites to control their time spent browsing. We ran three in-the-wild field experiments on HabitLab to compare static interventions to rotated interventions. We found that rotating between interventions increased effectiveness as measured by time on site, but also increased attrition: more users uninstalled HabitLab. To minimize attrition, we introduced a just-in-time information design about rotation. This design reduced attrition rates by half. With this research, we suggest that interaction design, paired with rotation of behavior change interventions, can help users gain control of their online habits.

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Many long-term goals, such as learning a language, require people to spend a small amount of time each day to achieve them. At the same time, people regularly browse social news feeds in their spare time. Our system, FeedLearn, teaches vocabulary in the context of Facebook feeds, by showing users interactive quizzes they can answer without leaving their feeds. It is implemented as a Chrome extension, as Facebook's API does not currently allow developers to insert interactive content into feeds. In our preliminary user study, we compared Japanese vocabulary learning rates when interactive quizzes were inserted directly into feeds, versus inserting links that lead them to quizzes. Our results suggest that users learn more and engage more with microlearning tasks when quizzes can be done without leaving their feeds.