Beyond Limitations of Current Behaviour Change Apps for Sustainable Mobility: Insights from a User-Centered Design and Evaluation Process

Francesca Cellina,Martin Raubal,Dominik Bucher,José Veiga Simão,Roman Rudel

doi:10.3390/su11082281

Francesca Cellina, Martin Raubal + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su11082281

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Abstract

How can we encourage people to make sustainable mobility choices, reducing car dependency and the related CO 2 emissions and energy consumption? Taking advantage of the wide availability of smartphone devices, we designed GoEco!, an application (app) exploiting automatic mobility tracking, eco-feedback, social comparison and gamification elements to persuade individuals to change their mode of transport. The app features and contents are grounded in the transtheoretical model for behaviour change and were designed to avoid over-reliance on “one-size-fits-all”, simplistic point-based systems. The GoEco! app was designed in a user centred approach and was field-tested in Switzerland in a three-month experiment involving around 150 voluntary users. In this paper, we present the app’s features and comment on their evaluation from the perspective of the field-testers. The insights we collected through an online questionnaire and individual interviews allowed us to develop recommendations for similar persuasive apps and to identify open challenges for the future. In particular, we recommend to endow such apps with multi-modal travel planning components and features evoking the feeling of belonging to a community, that provide support and helping relationships.

Highlights

To counteract local and global problems associated with the deep-rooted car dependency [1,2,3] and lock-in in the “automobility system” [4] currently affecting most urban areas, cities seek to improve mobility alternatives to cars and promote the use of a mix of transport modes, facilitating the break of car-dependent habits [5] and encouraging a higher uptake of public transport and soft mobility transport modes
To facilitate comparison with other Behaviour Change Support Systems (BCSS), we refer to the framework for persuasive systems design [59] and the taxonomy for behaviour change interventions [60]: Table 1 shows an overview of all GoEco! features and components, allowing to frame them in terms of both the theoretical background and the persuasive principles and techniques they exploit
We presented an attempt to overcome the main limitations that were found to affect behaviour change apps targeting more sustainable individual mobility patterns

Summary

Introduction

To counteract local and global problems associated with the deep-rooted car dependency [1,2,3] and lock-in in the “automobility system” [4] currently affecting most urban areas, cities seek to improve mobility alternatives to cars and promote the use of a mix of transport modes, facilitating the break of car-dependent habits [5] and encouraging a higher uptake of public transport and soft mobility transport modes. Smartphone apps persuading users to engage in more sustainable behaviour were at first developed to promote electricity and water savings, accompanying the roll-out of smart meter devices to measure real-time electricity and water consumption (among others, see [14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28]) Such apps provide users with feedback on consequences of their choices (usually, in terms of energy consumption and CO2 emissions), invite them to define personal goals for change, engage in challenges and compare their performances with other users, often exploiting the users’ social network relationships [29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38]. Typical gamification mechanics and elements are competition, cooperation, assignments, quests, goals, points, levels, badges, and leaderboards [40]

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