Lesson05

Emotional Interaction
'Persuasive Technologies and Behavioral Change

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A diversity of techniques has been used at the interface level
to draw people’s attention to certain kinds of information in
an attempt to change what they do or think. Pop-up ads,
warning messages, reminders, prompts, personalized
messages, and recommendations are some of the methods
that are being deployed on a computer or smartphone
interface. Examples include Amazon’s one-click mechanism
that makes it easy to buy something on its online store and
recommender systems that suggest specific books, hotels,
restaurants, and so forth, that a reader might want to try
based on their previous purchases, choices, and taste. The
various techniques that have been developed have been
referred to as persuasive design (Fogg, 2009). They include
enticing, cajoling, or nudging someone into doing something
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Technology interventions have also been developed to
change people’s behaviors in other domains besides
commerce, including safety, preventative healthcare,
fitness, personal relationships, energy consumption, and
learning. Here the emphasis is on changing someone’s
habits or doing something that will improve an individual’s
well-being through monitoring their behavior. An early
example was Nintendo’s Pokémon Pikachu device (see
Figure 6.12) that was designed to motivate children into
being more physically active on a consistent basis. The
owner of the digital pet that lives in the device was required
to walk, run, or jump each day to keep it alive. The wearer
received credits for each step taken—the currency being
watts that could be used to buy Pikachu presents.
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Twenty steps on the pedometer rewarded the player with 1
watt. If the owner did not exercise for a week, the virtual pet
became angry and refused to play anymore. This use of
positive rewarding and sulking can be a powerful means of
persuasion, given that children often become emotionally
attached to their virtual pets, especially when they start to
care for them.
HAPIfork is a device that was developed to help someone
monitor and track their eating habits (see Figure 6.13). If it
detects that they are eating too quickly, it will vibrate
(similar to the way a smartphone does when on silent mode),
and an ambient light will appear at the end of the fork,
providing the eater with real-time feedback intended to slow
them down.
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The assumption is that eating too fast results in poor
digestion and poor weight control and that making people
aware that they are gobbling their food down can help them
think about how to eat more slowly at a conscious level.
Other data is collected about how long it took them to finish
their meal, the number of fork servings per minute, and the
time between them. These are turned into a dashboard of
graphs and statistics so that the user can see each week
whether their fork behavior is improving.
Nowadays, there are many kinds of mobile apps and
personal tracking devices available that are intended to help
people monitor various behaviors and change them based
on the data collected and displayed back to them. These
devices include fitness trackers, for example, Fitbit, and
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Similar to HAPIfork, these devices are designed to encourage
people to change their behavior by displaying dashboards of
graphs showing how much exercise they have done or
weight they have lost over a day, week, or longer period,
compared with what they have done in the previous day,
week, or month. These results can also be compared,
through online leaderboards and charts, with how well they
have done versus their peers and friends. Other techniques
employed to encourage people to exercise more or to move
when sedentary include goal setting, reminders, and rewards
for good behavior. A survey of how people use such devices
in their everyday lives revealed that people often bought
them simply to try them or were given one as a present,
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How, what, and when they tracked depended on their
interests and lifestyles; some used them as a way of showing
how fast they could run during a marathon or cycle on a
course or how they could change their lifestyle to sleep or
eat better
An alternative approach to collecting quantified data about a
behavior automatically is to ask people to write down
manually how they are feeling now or to rate their mood and
for them to reflect upon how they felt about themselves in
the past. A mobile app called Echo, for example, asked
people to write a subject line, rate their happiness at that
moment, and add a description, photos, and/or videos if they
wanted to (Isaacs et al., 2013). Sporadically, the app then
asked them to reflect on previous entries.
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An assumption was that this type of technology-mediated
reflection could increase well-being and happiness. Each
reflection was shown as a stacked card with the time and a
smiley happiness rating. People who used the Echo app
reported on the many positive effects of doing so, including
reliving positive experiences and overcoming negative
experiences by writing them down. The double act of
recording and reflecting enabled them to generalize from the
positive experiences and draw positive lessons from them.

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The global concern about climate change has also led a
number of HCI researchers to design and evaluate various
energy-sensing devices that display real-time feedback. One
goal is to find ways of helping people reduce their energy
consumption, and it is part of a larger research agenda
called sustainable HCI: see Mankoff et al., 2008; DiSalvo
et al., 2010; Hazas et al., 2012. The focus is to persuade
people to change their everyday habits with respect to
environmental concerns, such as reducing their own carbon
footprint, their community’s footprint (for example, a school
or workplace), or an even larger organization’s carbon
footprint (such as a street, town, or country).

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Extensive research has shown that domestic energy use can
be reduced by providing households with feedback on their
consumption (Froehlich et al., 2010). The frequency of
feedback is considered important; continuous or daily
feedback on energy consumption has been found to yield
higher savings results than monthly feedback. The type of
graphical representation also has an effect. If the image
used is too obvious and explicit (for instance, a finger
pointing at the user), it may be perceived as too personal,
blunt, or “in your face,” resulting in people objecting to it. In
contrast, simple images (for example, an infographic or
emoticon) that are more anonymous but striking and whose
function is to get people’s attention may be more effective.
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They may encourage people to reflect more on their energy
use and even promote public debate about what is
represented and how it affects them. However, if the image
used is too abstract and implicit, other meanings may be
attributed to it, such as simply being an art piece (such as an
abstract painting with colored stripes that change in
response to the amount of energy used), resulting in people
ignoring it. The ideal may be somewhere in between. Peer
pressure can also be effective, where peers, parents, or
children chide or encourage one another to turn lights off,
take a shower instead of a bath, and so on.

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Another influencing factor is social norms. In a classic study
by P. Wesley Schultz et al., (2007), households were shown
how their energy consumption compared with their
neighborhood average. Households above the average
tended to decrease their consumption, but those using less
electricity than average tended to increase their
consumption. The study found that this “boomerang” effect
could be counteracted by providing households with an
emoticon along with the numerical information about their
energy usage: households using less energy than average
continued to do so if they received a smiley icon; households
using more than average decreased their consumption even
more if they were given a sad icon.
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In contrast to the Schultz study, where each household’s
energy consumption was kept private, the Tidy Street
project (Bird and Rogers, 2010) that was run in Brighton in
the United Kingdom created a large-scale visualization of the
street’s electricity usage by spray-ing a stenciled display on
the road surface using chalk (see Figure 6.14). The public
display was updated each day to represent how the average
electricity usage of the street compared to the city of
Brighton’s average.

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The goal was to provide real-time feedback that all of the
homeowner’s and the general public could see change each
day over a period of three weeks. The street graph also
proved to be very effective in getting people who lived on
Tidy Street to talk to each other about their electricity
consumption and habits. It also encouraged them to talk
with the many passersby who walked up and down the
street. The outcome was to reduce electricity consumption in
the street by 15 percent, which was considerably more than
other projects in this area have been able to achieve.

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