What happened
The one sec app is for people who want to use certain apps less. The user picks the apps, such as a social media app. When they try to open one, one sec shows a short message and a 10-second wait with a moving screen, plus a button to close the app instead of opening it.
David Grüning of Heidelberg University and Philipp Lorenz-Spreen of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin studied it with Frederik Riedel, who created one sec. The paper discloses this. They recruited 719 people who had just installed the app, through a message in the app itself, and the main analysis covers the 280 who used it for all six weeks. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.
In 36% of all attempts to open a chosen app, users closed it at the pause. Attempts also became less frequent: from an average of 166 per user in the first week to 105 in the sixth, a drop of 37%. Combining the two, the authors write that one sec “decreased users' actual opening of target apps by 57% after six consecutive weeks.”
The share of attempts dropped at the pause was 43% in the first week and 36% in the second. From the third week on, it stayed between 32% and 34%.
To see which part of the pop-up mattered, the team ran a separate online experiment with 500 participants, including a control group. Offering a way to back out “has the strongest effect,” they found. The time delay was “also effective” but did “not add to the effect of the option to dismiss.” The message “is not effective on its own.”
The authors are open about the limits. The six-week field study had no control group, so users are compared with their own earlier weeks. People who choose an app like this may differ from people who do not, and those who stopped using it early were left out of the main analysis. Six weeks is also a short time.
What it shows
A small amount of friction at the moment of acting changes what people do. The app banned nothing: the chosen apps still opened for anyone who waited out the pause. Even so, people used the pause to change their mind in about a third of their attempts.
The experiment suggests what makes a pause useful: a clear, easy way to say no, offered at the moment of acting. A message on its own did nothing.
This was a study of smartphone apps, with people who chose to take part. It shows that a pause can change a habit. It does not tell us how large the effect would be for other habits.
About Unlure
How Unlure uses this
Unlure puts a pause in front of every way out, and makes it much longer. Turning protection off, unblocking a site, switching off a filter or shortening the wait all take three days. Protection stays on the whole time.
Backing out stays easy, as it did in one sec. A request can be cancelled at any point while it waits. When the wait ends, a code appears on your dashboard, and if you do nothing with it for a day, the request lapses and protection simply stays on.
The pause only works in one direction. Adding a site to your block list or switching a filter back on happens at once.
This part describes Unlure. None of the sources on this page studied it.
Sources
- 1.
Grüning, D. J., Riedel, F. and Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2023). “Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(8), e2213114120.
A wait between the urge and the way out.
Unlure blocks adult sites on your Windows PC or Android phone. Making it stricter is instant. Turning it off takes three days.