Self-Regulating Traction Towards Pursuits Through Awareness Prompting: A User-Centered Design Approach

Abstract

According to self-determination theory, achieving self-determination through the achievement of personal pursuits, not only contributes to self-formation but also fulfills a basic psychological need. The problem is, that despite the necessity of this progression, individuals fail to achieve their goals on a regular basis; distractions are the loss of mental autonomy that take us away from our intentional actions.

With the increase in smartphone apps and media services that encourage distraction, self-regulation has become even more challenging to achieve. To successfully self-regulate requires awareness of our goals, to see our actions in goal congruency, and to adjust accordingly. Thus, this study proposes the "Pursuits App" which leverages smartphone prompting as a mechanism to both bringing awareness to intentions and to provide necesseary insight to aid the self-regulation process. In this study, we evaluate how the user's level of notification fatigue affects the desirability of prompt-oriented features according to different demographic factors.

Using a user-centered design framework, the first step in this study gathers contextual information from 34 participants, to understanding of the needs of those affected by this problem space. The findings of a pilot questionnaire study indicate that 78.8% of participants rate importance as 6/7 or higher for progressing pursuits and that distractions and insufficient energy greatly hinder traction. Eight user interviews with participants were reviewed and summarized into a persona, emphasizing the need for guidance, structure, regular awareness, and sustained traction. A conceptual prototype as a visually realistic representation of a functional mobile application was proposed and evaluated, with 32 participants responding using the Kano Model to rate the functional performance, customer satisfaction, and self-reported importance of the features.

The results of the study indicate that the user profile of full-time workers aged 27-35 and predominantly culturally identifying as East or Southeast Asian show the highest overall interest in proposed features. There is a positive correlation between the overall features of the product and "attractive" or "performance" qualities, likely reflecting the novelty of the product category and the lack of precedent and user expectations. As notification fatigue increased, the rating importance of weekly prompts declined, while the rating importance of end-of-commitment-cycle prompts remained consistent across all user groups.

There is a need for future research to investigate other types of personas, such as those who are not working or aged 23-26 or to expand the respondents beyond those who relate to the persona in order to understand more in-depth what unique characteristics may influence app usage.