Workshop Summary
CHI 2014, One of a CHInd, Toronto, ON, Canada
Personalizing Behavior Change Technologies Gary Hsieh
Harri Oinas-Kukkonen
Abstract
University of Washington
University of Oulu
The Personalization in Behavior Change Technologies workshop will focus on how to design, build and study persuasive technologies to adapt to meet the individualized needs of target users. The goal of this workshop is to connect the diverse group of behavior change researchers and practitioners interested in personalization to share their experiences, ideas, and discuss how to move the field forward. We will identify the key challenges in this area and brainstorm solutions to tackle these issues. Discussion and ideas generated from this workshop will be archived online to be available to the larger research community. This workshop ties into a number of special interests for the CHI community, including health, sustainability, intelligent user interfaces, serious games, and persuasive technology.
Department of Human Centered Department of Information Design & Engineering
Processing Science
[email protected]
[email protected]
Sean Munson
Oded Nov
University of Washington
Polytechnic Institute of New York Department of Human Centered University Design & Engineering Department of Technology
[email protected] Maurits Kaptein
Management and Innovation
[email protected]
Tilburg University, the Netherlands Department of Statistics and Research Methodology
[email protected]
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI'14, April 26–May 1, 2014, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. ACM 978-1-4503-2474-8/14/04. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2559206.2560474
Author Keywords Behavior Change; Personalization; Persuasive Technology; Health; Sustainability; Social Media; Serious Games; Feedback
ACM Classification Keywords H.5.0. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): General
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General Terms Design; Theory; Economics; Experimentation
Introduction The study and design of technologies for behavior change has continued to be an important and active area of research at CHI and its related communities [e.g.,2,9]. With advances in sensor technologies, analytics, and informatics, we now have the ability to focus on personalizing these technologies to more effectively support the needs of the users engaged in or targeted for behavior change. This type of personalization can help tailor different technologies to be more effective at behavior change by looking at users’ unique motivations, personalities, or preferences, which will make them more likely to be effective in evoking change [e.g.1,3,7]. In addition, using advanced techniques like machine learning, we can design new technologies that can adapt to users’ changing needs to sustain use over time. These types of technologies have applications ranging in domains from health to sustainability to personal finance to online community participation [e.g.,5,6,7]. Despite the potentials of personalization in this domain, there are still many research challenges that need be addressed before they become feasible for everyday use. A number of issues relating to theory, ethical, methodological, and technical are all open questions in how to approach the issue of personalization. Problems of personalization for behavior change cut across many domains and academic fields. Currently, there are silos of researchers tackling various aspects of these problems in specific domains, such as health, sustainability, online participation, etc, but there is important knowledge and valuable experiences that can
and needs to be shared. To facilitate knowledge sharing and community building, the goals of the workshop are to (1) map the researchers and labs active in this area; (2) identify the key domains researchers are active in (e.g. health); (3) initiate collaboration on research projects and proposal preparation; (4) identify links to non-HCI and industry research in the area.
Discussion Topics In this workshop, we will discuss the following topics and how they relate to the personalization of persuasive technologies. Ethics: One of the underlying issues with tailoring technologies to people’s specific needs are the ethics of the practice [e.g.,5]. Some people may feel that their privacy is violated if too much data is collected about them, and they may also feel that it may be “creepy” if a technology attempts to meet their needs. While this may be justified for more paternalistic domains like health or sustainability, it may be less comfortable in domains such as advertising or political persuasion. In addition, what are the implications of revealing the nature of tailoring, and if it reduces the efficacy, how much should be disclosed? Technical Issues: The ability to tailor technologies to meet the needs of individuals is also a difficult problem technically [e.g.,10]. First, there are issues of how to collect relevant data and use it to tailor a technology. This may require expertise in machine learning and also in dynamic user interface generation, which are still challenging engineering problems. The workshop will discuss which strategies have been successful in tailoring persuasive technologies and which challenges remain yet unsolved.
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Personal Profiles: One of the key components of tailoring persuasive technology is knowing what data might be useful to base the tailoring on and also, how to collect that data. The workshop will discuss specific types of data that might be useful for different domains (e.g., responses to standardized questionnaires, personality tests, usage data, etc.) and different strategies that might be used to collect this data. Evaluation: One of the main challenges of tailoring technologies is that they become more difficult to evaluate. Behavior change technologies are already difficult to evaluate [8], and when tailoring is involved, it increases the challenge. For example, it may be difficult to conduct studies with large numbers or in shorter, controlled lab sessions due to the unique nature of each technology that is generated. In addition, if tailoring adjusts over time, then longer studies would be needed to see the effects of how tailoring affects use over time. The workshop will discuss experimental design and evaluation strategies that work as valid and useful baseline comparisons. Domains: Persuasive technologies can be useful in changing people’s behaviors or influencing perspectives in a number of fields, ranging from health to sustainability to advertising to politics. The workshop will discuss how personalization differs across domains and what can be re-used and generalized.
Workshop Organization The Personalization in Behavior Change Technologies workshop will consist of a single day workshop that will include approximately 20 total participants. The workshop is organized as follows:
Pre-Workshop: Researchers and practitioners working on topics related to behavior change with a specific interest in personalization are invited to participate. The organizers are connected to a number of different organizations and companies across geographical boundaries. We will advertise our workshop through a variety of venues to attract attendees who may not normally attend CHI regularly, such as health researchers, persuasion scholars, and game designers. Those interested are asked to submit a position paper between 2 to 4 pages. The paper can contain ongoing work, recent results, perspectives, or methods relevant to personalization for behavior change. The papers will be reviewed by the workshop organizers, and participants will be selected based on diversity of visions and backgrounds. We will make position papers available ahead of the conference. To “hit the ground running” at the meeting, we will request participants to upload a short bio and to comment on each other’s position papers prior to the workshop. Workshop: At the workshop, we will start with an introduction and 5-minute madness of position papers (9:00-10:15). We will then continue with the general discussion of major challenges in the field (10:3012:00). Research questions from our aforementioned discussion topics will be distributed to our attendees prior to the workshop. Participants are also welcome to submit any other topics to discuss before and during the workshop. After lunch (13:30-15:15), participants will form smaller working groups around identified domains of interest (e.g., health, sustainability). We anticipate around 2-4 groups. Each group will have a self-appointed coordinator who will facilitate the discussion and a scribe. These working groups will
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break out and discuss challenges specific to their domains, curriculum development, potential collaboration on research projects, or proposal writing. In the final session (15:30-17:30), each group will present the highlights of their discussion to the larger group. We will then identify common themes across the groups, and ideas for cross-domain collaborations (e.g. by focusing on fundamental aspects of personalization and behavior change and how studying them across domains can lead to generalizable insights and design guidelines). We will end the workshop with a discussion of concrete next steps and the people who will coordinate them. Post-Workshop: After the workshop, we intend to keep the discussion going and to report the results of the discussion back to the larger CHI community. This will include the development of several social networking groups for participants and others interested in the topic, on forums such as Reddit and Facebook. We will also create a public, shared Mendeley group that can be used by the community to share references relevant to the personalization of persuasive technologies. To help document the workshop progress, we will submit a summary to Interactions magazine and propose a special issue on the topic to ACM’s ToCHI.
Expected Outcome The goal of this workshop is to develop a stronger community surrounding personalization and persuasive technology and help move the field forward through discussion of timely topics and sharing of successes and challenges. We believe this workshop will help participants to understand the field more completely and to push the CHI community forward in making
progress and steering the direction of this emerging area of research. Finally, we hope that the workshop will result in archival work through the generation of a special issue of a journal.
References
[1] Dijkstra, A. and De Vries, H. (1999). The development of computer-generated tailored interventions. Patient Education and Counseling, 36(2):193–203. [2] Fogg, B. J. (2002). Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann. [3] Hirsh, J. B., Kang, S. K., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2012). Personalized persuasion: tailoring persuasive appeals to recipients’ personality traits. Psychological science, 23(6), 578-81. [4] Kaptein, M; Eckles, D. (2010) Selecting Effective Means to Any End: Futures and Ethics of Persuasion Profiling. Persuasive 2010. pp. 82-93 [5] Kaptein, M., & Halteren, A. (2012). Adaptive persuasive messaging to increase service retention: using persuasion profiles to increase the effectiveness of email reminders. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 1-13. [6] Lockton, D., Harrison, D., and Stanton, N. (2008). Making the user more efficient: design for sustainable behaviour. International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, 1(1):3–8. [7] Noar, S. M., Benac, C. N., and Harris, M. S. (2007). Does tailoring matter? Meta-analytic review of tailored print health behavior change interventions. Psychological Bulletin, 133(4):673–693. [8] Predrag V. K., Sunny C., Wanda P. (2011) How to evaluate technologies for health behavior change in HCI research. CHI 2011. 3063-3072 [9] Preece, J. J. (2010). I Persuade, They Persuade, It Persuades! Human-Computer Interaction, pages 2–3. [10] Torning, K., Hall, C., and Oinas-Kukkonen, H. (2009). Persuasive System Design: State of the Art and Future Directions. Information Systems Journal, 1.
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