Persuasive Application Research Articles

StepsBooster-S: A Culturally Tailored Step-Based Persuasive Application for Promoting Physical Activity

An inactive lifestyle is associated with an increased risk of health problems. The combination of mobile step-trackers and persuasive strategies can be considered useful tools for encouraging physical activity. This paper presents the design, development, and evaluation of a culturally tailored persuasive app to motivate physical activity. For this research, we developed a step-tracking app, StepsBooster-S, that is tailored to be culturally appropriate for Saudi adults using the user-centred design approach. A 10-day in-the-wild study was conducted with 30 participants to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of the app using a mixed-methods approach. Results showed that StepsBooster-S is generally effective; however, it led to a highly significant increase in physical activity among the Saudis compared to Canadians. Our results also showed that the Saudi audience engaged more with the app, reported more positive experience from using the app, and enjoyed the collectivists-oriented features such as cooperation more than the Canadian audience. We conclude that persuasive health apps, especially those that are targeted at physical activity, are more effective if they are tailored to be culturally appropriate for the target audience. These findings reinforce the importance of cultural factors for designing technologies that motivate behaviour change.

Health Monitoring Apps: An Evaluation of the Persuasive System Design Model for Human Wellbeing

In the current era of ubiquitous computing and mobile technology, almost all human beings use various self-monitoring applications. Mobile applications could be the best health assistant for safety and adopting a healthy lifestyle. Therefore, persuasive designing is a compulsory element for designing such apps. A popular model for persuasive design named the Persuasive System Design (PSD) model is a generalized model for whole persuasive technologies. Any type of persuasive application could be designed using this model. Designing any special type of application using the PSD model could be difficult because of its generalized behavior which fails to provide moral support for users of health applications. There is a strong need to propose a customized and improved persuasive system design model for each category to overcome the issue. This study evaluates the PSD model and finds persuasive gaps in users of the Mobile Health Monitoring application, developed by following the PSD model. Furthermore, this study finds that users misunderstand health-related problems when using such apps. A misunderstanding of this nature can have serious consequences for the user’s life in some cases.

Social+Me: a persuasive application to increase communication between students and their support networks in Southern Chile.

Technology can improve university students’ communication, helping them maintain relationships. Although there are many available technological tools, students face challenges—e.g., living far from home, failing grades, depression—that may isolate them from their networks. Most research into these topics has been conducted in countries in which students leave their parents’ home while at university, which is not the case for most students in southern Chile. In this context that has been seldom studied, this paper presents two studies, focusing on two research questions: (1) How do university students in southern Chile communicate? (2) Can a mobile application persuade university students to increase their communication patterns? To answer these questions, we conducted a survey with 90 students in southern Chile, and then developed a persuasive application called Social+Me, aimed at monitoring communication with students’ support networks and persuading them to keep in touch. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of Social+Me, and the application was well received by participants, who felt that it improved their communication with their social network. The main impact of our study lies in applying persuasive technologies to the communicative practice of university students to prevent students from feeling isolated or unsupported.

The use of digital technologies in social marketing: a systematic review

PurposeWith the explosion of digital technologies in contemporary daily life, fuelled by a pandemic and remote working, online learning and shopping and the proliferation of social platforms, much remains nebulous about the opportunities these technologies hold for social marketers beyond their previously documented use as communication and promotion tools. This paper aims to provide a rich examination of the variety of digital technologies used within social marketing and establish the scale of integration between digital technologies and social marketing.Design/methodology/approachFollowing systematic literature review procedures, a systematic literature review through eight databases was conducted. The systematic review focussed on the assessment of social marketing studies that incorporated a wide range of mature and emerging digital technologies such as the internet, mobile platforms and social media channels. A total of 50 social marketing studies (2014–2020) were analysed.FindingsThe review found that there have been major advancements in the technologies available to social marketers in recent years. Furthermore, the adoption of digital technologies by social marketers has evolved from a communication or promotion function where generic information is pushed to the citizen, towards the use of these technologies for a more personalised design, content and behaviour change intervention. In some studies, the digital technologies were the primary means for interactions and collaborations to take place. The review also found that digital technologies target more than the individual citizen. Digital technologies are used to target multi-level stakeholders, policy makers and partners as part of behavioural change interventions.Originality/valueOnly two previous reviews have synthesised digital technologies and their use in social marketing. This review provides a recent depiction of the range and scale of integration within social marketing. Specifically, it demonstrates the expansion beyond a persuasive application to their use for research, segmentation and targeting, collaboration and co-creation, the product and facilitator of service delivery. Finally, this review provides a heat map to illustrate the integration between digital technologies and key concepts and criteria within social marketing.

Designing Persuasive Application to Promote Public Transportation Use

The poor air quality of Jakarta, caused among others by fossil fuel combustion for transportation, harmfully affects the health of its people. Carbon emissions resulting from transportation activities can be reduced by getting people to use public transportation more frequently. This research aims at designing a persuasive application to encourage people to use public transportation more often. The steps of interaction design were employed. Firstly, user needs were identified using interviews, resulting in 48 interpreted needs which were then grouped into nine primary needs. Secondly, a design workshop involving users and designers was conducted to produce three concept alternatives. In the next stage, the best concept was selected using the concept scoring method and was subsequently refined through the SCAMPER method. A high-fidelity prototype was developed based on the final concept. Lastly, the evaluation process of the application prototype named ecoGlide consisted of two major parts, i.e. the evaluation of performance and persuasive qualities. The performance evaluation was conducted through Usability Testing using five criteria. The effectiveness and efficiency criteria consecutively score 91% and 71.43%, exceeding the minimum acceptable value of 70%. Furthermore, the satisfaction, usefulness, and learnability criteria respectively score 3.83, 3.88, and 3.88, which surpass the threshold value of 3.4. The persuasive quality was evaluated using the qualitative method through a coding scheme. The result shows that the Emotion and Persuasion categories were most closely related to the application use. The most influential sub-category of the persuasion aspect is Reward Driven, which ranks 4th out of 14 sub-categories. Overall, the ecoGlide application was considered to have good usability and persuasive ability.

Designing a Persuasive Application for Behaviour Change with Children:

Persuasive technology is a technology that is designed deliberately to change user behaviour without coercion and deception. This study demonstrates the design of a persuasive mobile application aiming to encourage children below 12 years old to take care of their teeth and increase their awareness towards the importance of dental care. We applied a design thinking approach which comprised of five different phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. A total of 13 children participated in this study. The findings show that children found that the application informs them how to brush their teeth properly and increases their awareness about the importance of dental care. This indicates that the design thinking approach is indeed useful for the designer to design a persuasive application aiming to change children’s behaviour.

SAS4P: Providing automatic smoking detection for a persuasive smoking cessation application

Smoking is the biggest avoidable health risk, causing millions of deaths per year worldwide. Persuasive applications are those designed to change a person’s behavior, usually in a specific way. Several mobile phone applications and messaging systems have been used to promote smoking cessation. However, most interventions use participants’ self-reports to track cigarette consumption and avoidance, which may not be accurate or objective. Previous proposals have used sensors to track hand movements and other contextual data to detect smoking or have used devices to detect smoke or breath carbon monoxide. This article proposes a low-cost wearable device that may be worn in a front shirt pocket or clipped to clothing to detect smoke and secondhand smoke. Furthermore, the device is integrated into a persuasive application to promote smoking cessation. The device was evaluated through an experiment to detect whether it may detect direct, passive, and no smoking conditions. The results are promising and may help improve tracking of cigarettes in persuasive applications.

Individual Persuasive Eco‐travel Technology, a mobile persuasive application for implementing voluntary travel behaviour change programmes

This study presents a voluntary travel behaviour change (VTBC) programme that involves the use of a technology platform. The platform has been developed both for enhancing the efficacy of the implementation and for highlighting the contribution that technology itself can provide in persuasion strategies. It can be applied in the VTBC implementation for encouraging individuals to reduce car use, mitigating global greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, the proposed platform is designed to automate phases and activities of a VTBC programme, with a view to extending it to the large scale, reducing the resource commitment. Indeed, technology could contribute to facilitating the operational and functional aspects, through the implementation of automated VTBC programmes, broadening their applicability while maintaining effectiveness. Furthermore, technology can be persuasive in changing behaviour.

Design Implications of a Conversational Agent in an Implicitly- Persuasive Application

Persuasion can be used to encourage an individual to change his/her behaviors. However, persuading people in one of multiple behavior stages, such as a degree of achievement of target behavior, requires consideration suitable for each stage. We have proposed a persuasive application that implicitly encourages users to walk continuously in implicit manner. The persuasion is designed to be adapted to the users’ estimated current behavior stage. Additionally, this application aims to enable users to walk actively while they play a location-based game and converse with an agent. In this paper, we discuss the design implications of a persuasive conversational agent in an implicitly persuasive application. We specify three aspects: adaptive persuasion, ubiquity and game mechanics.

U-FADE

Although persuasive technology continues to impact behavioural and attitudinal interventions, research has demonstrated that existing design approaches are faced with limitations that impede their effective use. Mostly, they become obsolete, as user needs change during the use of the persuasive application. This research therefore proposes the Unified Framework for Analysing, Designing and Evaluating persuasive systems (U-FADE). The proposed framework integrates concepts from various existing models to provide a systematic approach that facilitates persuasive design. It addresses the issue of changing needs of users by considering external and internal activities that may promote or impede persuasion before and during implementation.

The application of persuasive technology to educational settings

Persuasive technology is a sub-discipline of Human–Computer Interaction that has emerged within the last 10 years, and which has generated increasing interest in the application of persuasion to systems design. Most applications have to date been developed in commercial contexts, as well in the domain of health promotion. We present a mainly theoretical consideration of how persuasive technology could be used in educational contexts, particularly in school settings. We consider how persuasive technology design may need to be modified to meet the needs of complex educational settings. We propose four design principles for the use of persuasive technology in instructional design, including credibility and Kairos. We derive these from theoretical considerations, as well as from our experience with the HANDS project, which has developed a mobile persuasive application for positive behaviour change in young people with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. We conclude that persuasive technology has the potential to be used effectively to bring about positive behavior and attitude change in school settings.

Persuasibility and its assessment

Persuasive technology is the use of computers, devices or applications to change a person’s attitudes or behavior. Persuasibility design within the system life-cycle is a nascent area of research which is different from design in the traditional method. This paper focuses on the research of persuasibility design and its assessment in the system life-cycle. A life-cycle oriented systemic general theory is developed in this paper to evaluate persuasibility design. Persuasibility assessment is considered as a part of persuasibility design. Its procedure and method are explored and analyzed based on the system life-cycle in this paper. A possible research direction is to create more explicit and detailed persuasion design and assessment methods which can be used not only in personal computer persuasive application, but also many other electric devices that are designed for persuasion purposes.

A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles , and: Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles, and: Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction Lawrence D. Stewart Richard F. Patteson . A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin: U of Texas P, 1987. 164 pp. $18.95 cloth; pb. $7.95. Robin Lydenberg . Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. 222 pp. $24.95. Although Paul Bowles continues to be a writer of demonstrable quality, attention from literary critics has been notably sparse. Richard Patteson's A World Outside is, therefore, particularly welcome. It is a refreshing study that focuses on Bowles's themes and motifs and makes a persuasive application of structural analysis. Seeing architectural images as fundamental ("Bowles' work is delicately poised between the unacceptable chaos of experience and the unbelievable order of artifice"), Patteson examines the extensive range of Bowles's productions and discovers special merit in The Spider's House, that unjustifiably neglected novel. Patteson traces a basic image—that of a window—to Bowles's earliest recollection of his father, a man with such antipathy toward his son that he tried to kill the six-week old baby by placing him, naked, in an open window during a blizzard. Bowles's difficulties with his father are, of course, part of the novelist's legend. Patteson observes that Without Stopping, Bowles's autobiography, may be most profitably regarded as "a book that purports to be a factual account of his life." ("Total recall, with subtle variations," Bowles's old friend Bruce Morrissette has labeled the process.) Patteson's controlled skepticism helps his literary argument, for even autobiography is the product of a shaping imagination. "Bowles' sense of exile and his conviction that 'security is a false concept' have a much deeper explanatory source than the mere fact of living abroad." Because Bowles's work has so often been thought of in terms of its locale (North Africa and Latin America), the few stories set in North America have received little attention. Consider "How Many Midnights," for instance, which Patteson does consider—and profitably. Bowles thinks this story a failure because "I never think of it." But Patteson believes that those interested in Bowles's predominant themes should think of it. Written "in a little cottage up on the mountain in Tangier in the autumn of '47" while the author was at work on The Sheltering Sky, that story may have been, as Bowles once said to me, "sort of a vacation [End Page 249] from the desert." But it was not a vacation from his obsessive concerns: the loss of identity through absorption by another and the impossibility of meaningful relationships. Patteson's emphasis on the dichotomy of inside/outside and of the particular significance of windows in Bowles's work can certainly be defended by remarks that Bowles once made to me about this story. "The man [Van] is just a figment in a way. . . . You don't see him because he doesn't exist—even for her [June]; in a sense he's a part of her. We feel that she's invented him. (She's in the act of eating him, as it were. And he's not interested in being eaten.)" The inside/outside dichotomy was evidently in Bowles's mind as he worked on the story: "And suddenly . . . [Van] disappears. That's his way of behavior, as exemplified by what he does in the bookshop. He lets the man steal the books and then catches him, rather than going in while he's stealing them. He watches from outside. So he's been watching her from outside." Patteson's repeated references to this story in his analysis of inside/outside should finally bring attention to "How Many Midnights" and prove, incidentally, that geography is not the only road into Bowles's world. Inevitably a few interpretations here and there in Patteson's book may perplex Bowles's readers. It is correct to parallel "the collapse of first Port's, then Kit's, sanity"? Undoubtedly Kit does go insane. But are not Port's final perceptions mystical rather than mad? Is it not...