Using Individual and Collaborative Challenges in Behavior Change Support Systems: Findings from a Two-Month Field Trial of a Trip Planner Application

Abstract

Abstract. Besides other popular strategies, such as feedback and (social) comparisons, challenges have been proposed and used to influence people's behavior towards a targeted goal. However, only very limited data on the effectiveness of such approaches and how to best design them is available yet. In this work we report the findings of a two months field study analyzing the effectiveness and perception of challenges in the context of influencing personal mobility. Individual and collaborative approaches towards challenges were studied, and specific focus was laid on what aspect makes users willing to participate in these challenges. Our findings suggest that both individual and collaborative challenges have the potential to sustain the interest of users in using behavior change support systems, that collaborative and individual challenges seem to not attract different types of users, that individual challenges in general are preferred, and that challenges are only a useful means for a subset of users. Also, ICT-competence seems to be an important aspect of being willing to participate in electronically organized challenges.

Persuasive Technologies for Sustainable Mobility: State of the Art and Emerging Trends

“…Behavioural Change: [8,[12][13][14][15][20][21][22][23]31,33,40] Attitude Change: [10] System/Approach: [6][7][8][9][10][11]13,16,[18][19][20][21][23][24][25][28][29][30]33,34,36,40,42,45] Partially successful 33%…”

Matching User Preferences and Behavior for Mobility

“…Katona and Juhász [23] characterized user habits and multimodal route planning in the city of Budapest. Schrammel et al [40] consider the challenges in behavior change by using data coming from journey planner application. Even though it does not strictly analyze user behavior, the work by Esztergár-Kiss and Csiszár [9], characterized Hungarian journey planners by considering the features that are made available to the users.…”

“…The data analysis can also produce insights that serve as input for other purposes, such as the improvement of transport service according to users' needs [42], the promotion of changes of users' habits [40] (e.g., the adoption of greener and healthier solutions [13]), and the improvement of journey planners and transport portals, considering their usability and the services they offer [10,45].…”

Mobile Services for Green Living

“…The analysis of individual and collaborative challenges encouraging personal mobility changes seemed to work with existing support systems. Beyond the challenges as game elements, individual challenges got better perception from users likely using information technologies or electronic participation to tackle their mobility issues (Schrammel et al, 2015). Finally, the study from Opromolla et al (2015) found an important role of gamification in policy making and smart city planning.…”