Persuasive System Practices in Mobile Application Development

Abstract

Mobile application development is at swift pace of growth across the globe. This industry also creates financial opportunities towards entrepreneurs also independent software developers. Yet, with the exponential growth of mobile applications released daily, hundreds of these software programs were being abandoned and neglected. The development of high quality mobile applications also requires the understanding of requirements needed associated with the development of the software products in order to fulfil the special needs of the products. This research was conducted with the aim to qualitative explore the persuasive technology practices followed and the processes involved which able to enhance the success level of the mobile applications. For this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the involvement of seven software developers and fifteen mobile applications as the case studies for the research. It has been shown that persuasive system design is appropriate to be incorporated in the process of software development as it provides a structural guideline that reflects users’ requirements in the context of attitudes and behaviours. Based on this assumption, it is identified that the incorporation of persuasive context at the initial stage of software development may affect the quality of the mobile applications in a long term.