Persuasive design principles were explored to help motivate, support and raise awareness of individuals’ environmental footprint while creating a concept for an app called EcoHero and five suggested features for designing persuasive technology related to behavior change.
Read ThesisHow can individuals carbon footprint be decreased through interaction design incorporating methods for behavioral change in the design of smartphone applications? What features should be considered when designing products aiming to decrease the carbon footprint of individuals?
The plan of the project followed an iterative design process where new requirements from potential users were put into the concept, making it more coherent with a user-centered approach. Stages in the process were initiation and planning, background and user research, requirements gathering and analysis, concept and design development and evaluation.
In order to understand what motivate people when it comes to sustainability in relation to their own behavior and attitudes, a questionnaire was sent out. Altogether, there were 74 persons who responded to the questionnaire, which resulted in the discovery of interesting user patterns in attitudes, thoughts, behaviors and opinions on several matters.
We conducted usability tests with potential users after each prototyping cycle where different scenarios were presented to the test persons. We conducted the user tests in pairs so that the test persons could talk to each other and in a more natural way express what they thought. An evaluation based on the method Heuristic Evaluation of Persuasive Features was also conducted to analyze the theories and frameworks used to create the different parts of the prototype since it can be difficult to evaluate the persuasiveness of the prototype in other ways.
The concept was illustrated with a final prototype, which was created through a design process of three prototyping cycles. EcoHero consists of five screens, being the screens Main, Statistics, Challenges, Communities, and Profile. Setting a CO2 goal is a fundamental aspect of the concept and it is done through onboarding screens, which introduce the user to the prototype and concept. EcoHero is an Eco-Feedback concept, where the common thread is the carbon footprint coupled with a social layer.
Through this project, a total of six features have been found to be effective when designing an application related to behavior change, through the lens of sustainability:
Daily behavioral feedback
The ability to track the behavior of the user together with information about possible improvements. The less manual input the user has to make the better. Users often seek more information to understand their own behavior. Helpful tips for improvement can be seen as both helpfull and annoying.
Engaging features for initial and long-term motivation
One of the most important features is to raise motivation and make the user engaged in the product. There is a need to explore this feature more in-depth and study this for longer periods of time. Users get motivated by various aspects, and it is therefore important to provide several sources of motivation.
Reaching target goals
One important factor to enable this is by letting the user set their own goals, and that there are multiple ways of reaching success. Users have different starting points and abilities, and it is therefore important that the goals can be set on an individual level. Critical in this context is that the design is forgiving and encouraging when the user is not performing well, or not according to their set target.
Behavioral feedback over time
To be able to see the progression over time, the user can get motivated, understand what actions worked well or not related to the desirable change, and feel committed to maintain the behavior change that is occurring. When providing behavioral feedback over time, it is critical that the information is visualized in a suitable way to the user.
Social layer as a support mechanism
Helping relationships is a vital part when trying to make a change and stay motivated. The results showed that some users prefer competitions as social, while others preferred more collaborative aspects. We therefore advise that both aspects should be included. Features including aspects of competition should be optional, since a competitive atmosphere can trigger anxiety or negative feelings for some users.