The ‘how’ and ‘why’ of fitness app use: investigating user motivations to gain insights into the nexus of technology and fitness

Abstract

Fitness tracking applications have demonstrated to be viable tools to help people meet the recommended guidelines of physical activity. Nevertheless, attrition rates of these applications are high. This indicates the need to thoroughly understand the unique motivations of users of these applications. Most importantly, why do these users turn to mHealth technologies and why do they continue utilizing them once the novelty associated with initial adoption wears off? To find this out we used computational methods to scrape user data from a popular fitness app (BodySpace) and conducted a thematic data analysis of user responses to questions about how they started using the app and why they love it. Findings of this study shed light on the unique motivations of this users and reveal possible design strategies than could be utilized within fitness tracking applications.