TNT: Exploring Pseudo Social Reminding for Effective Task Management

Abstract

Social reminders alert other people to do a task and are effective in promoting intended behaviors. To improve self- motivation of completing a task and produce similar effects of social reminders, we propose "pseudo social reminders", a personal task management system where users can set social reminders by themselves for their own social tasks. The goal of this research is to investigate how pseudo social reminders affect task management and how users perceive these message notifications. We built an Android app that uses notifications showing the sender’s name and photo to increase awareness of what users need to do and conducted a one week field study. The results from the user study showed that when receiving a message from a group member related to the task, participants felt social influ- ence. Most participants selected the reminding group that were related to the task and could remember the task with a greater impact through photos as visual aids.