As online marketplaces adopt new technologies to encourage consumers’ purchases (e.g., one-click purchases), the number of consumers who impulsively buy products also increases. Although some interventions have been introduced for consumers’ self-controlled purchases, there have been few studies that evaluate the effectiveness of the techniques in the real environment. In this paper, we conducted an online survey with 118 consumers in their 20s to investigate their impulse buying behaviors and self-control strategies. Based on the survey results and literature surveys, we developed interventions that can assist consumers in controlling their online purchase habits, including Reflection, Distraction, Desire Reduction, and Salient Cost. For evaluation, we enrolled 107 participants in a user study on a real-world e-commerce site. The results indicate that all interventions were effective in reducing impulse buying urges, with variations in user experiences. Our findings and design implications are discussed.

In this paper, we present a virtual reality based content/system called the "Drop the beat" designed to help the mindfulness and train one to overcome panic disorder. The two main elements of the proposed system are the (1) use of 360-degree video for presenting the panic inducing situation and, (2) facilitation of the mindfulness through a compelling scenario and immersive experience with multimodal feedback. In particular, we hypothesized that the direct observance and tangibly feeling for the beating heart in one's hand would help the user train to rationalize and overcome the situation (and e.g. effectively bring down one's heart rate back to a normal level). We conducted a small pilot study, administering the proposed VR content to five panic disorder patients and report the interim results.