Evaluating Mobile Apps Targeting Personal Goals

Abstract

Goals are fundamental to everyday life and are reflected in the growing HCI research in personal informatics and behaviour change. Besides academic work, a wealth of commercial mobile apps have also been developed to support users in setting their goals and achieving them. Despite their popularity, such apps, however, have been limitedly evaluated. We report a functionality review grounded in auto-ethnography and expert evaluation of the 21 most popular such apps selected from 1336 apps on the Google Play Store. We used a hybrid approach based on goal-setting theory for the evaluation. Findings indicate the more nuanced functionality of goal capturing, extending those explored in previous work for goal setting, monitoring and maintaining motivation. They also highlight the importance of distinguishing between high and low-level goals and their domains since most apps support multiple rather than individual goals. We conclude with design implications to support the setting of multiple personal goals at both high and low levels and across different domains, the use of consistent terms for distinguishing goals at different levels, and for visualizing the relationships among multiple goals.