‘I Don’t Need a Goal’: Attitudes and Practices in Fitness Tracking beyond WEIRD User Groups

Abstract

Fitness trackers have the potential for fostering sustained change and increasing well-being. However, the research community is yet to understand what design features and values need to be embodied in a fitness tracker for long-term engagement. While past work mainly focused on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) fitness trackers usersin North America and Western Europe, this paper investigates another perspective on fitness tracking. We conducted interviews with N = 37 fitness tracker users in the US, Europe and Egypt to identify the similarities and differences in attitudes and practices in fitness tracking. We found that fitness tracking involved a deeper social context in Egyptian communities and our findings suggest that Arabic users focused on physiological measurement, while non-Arab Western users appear to bewere more interested in goal achievement. We contribute design dimensions that can help build more inclusive tracker experiences. Our work highlights how future fitness trackers should support a customisable spectrum of design values to offer engaging experiences to a diverse and global audience.

Data Sensemaking in Self-Tracking: Towards a New Generation of Self-Tracking Tools

“…This might negatively skew the perception that STT is used only by Western societies. A few recent studies have recognized the importance of investigating self-tracking beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) user groups (e.g., Niess et al, 2021;Wilkowska et al, 2021). Still, to improve the inclusivity of future STT, we need more studies to specifically understand how data sensemaking practices differ across cultures and populations.…”