The Role of Emotion in Designing Self-tracking Visualization: Where Avatars are Better Choice than Dashboard

Abstract

The interface design of self-tracking technology still has a lot of room for improvement. At present, self-tracking products with the dashboard as the main interface face challenges in negative user experience and high abandon. In this paper, we try to improve the user experience of such technologies by paying more attention to the role of the user’s emotions on the visualization and enhance their willingness to continue to use. Based on our previous study on people-centered self-tracking system design, we think the avatars should be a better choice than dashboards of self-tracking technologies. In order to detect whether avatars can bring more positive emotions than the dashboards, and to reduce abandon, we designed and implemented three phases of usability testing: a questionnaire of popular self-tracking applications in the market, a self-tracking product emotional research based on avatar and dashboards, and a questionnaire based on self-tracking APP prototype with avatar template. Through these usability testing, we obtained results that users are more tend to adopt the avatar one. This paper then proposed results that 9 emotions are significantly different when using these two different interface designs of self-tracking visualization. With such results of research, two implication for principles of sustainable interaction design of self-tracking applications had been proposed in this paper as 1) Understandability; 2) Performance optimizations. We hope to provide a new form of visualization for the interface design of self-tracking technology and complement usability research results of such design.