Excited to share that the paper I authored has been accepted for ACM CHI 2020! This paper investigated a storytelling-driven fitness app for low-SES families, especially how to support the motivation to engage with such apps.
Storywell: Designing Family Fitness App Engagement by Using Social Rewards and Reflection (PDF)
Physical activity (PA) is critical for reducing the risk of obesity, a prevalent health concern that burdens low- socioeconomic status (SES) households. While self-tracking apps can increase PA, encouraging app engagement remains a challenge, thus limiting the app’s efficacy. To understand how to better support caregiver’s motivation to use family health apps, we designed and evaluated Storywell—a mobile app for promoting family PA. Guided by Self-Determination Theory, Storywell provides social rewards (e.g., storybooks with interactive reflective questions) aimed at supporting relatedness and motivation. Our 3-month qualitative study with 18 families revealed satisfying moments that can affect caregiver’s motivation. We contribute new knowledge on designing satisfying moments that heighten the motivation to use health apps, especially for low-SES families who face many barriers to using such systems.
Herman Saksono, Carmen Castaneda-Sceppa, Jessica Hoffman, Magy Seif El-Nasr, Vivien Morris, and Andrea G. Parker. To appear in CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2020), May 4–9, 2019, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. (24.3% acceptance rate) (PDF)