Designing a trip planning application for sustainable mobility : a user-centred approach
Timokainen, Lassi (2025)
2025
Tietotekniikan DI-ohjelma - Master's Programme in Information Technology
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2025-04-24
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202504244010
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202504244010
Tiivistelmä
Transportation plays a key role in modern society and the economy, connecting people and cultures as well as contributing significantly to individual well-being. It is however also a major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions, with passenger cars contributing over half of the sectors emissions alone. With the advent of new ICT solutions, trip planning ap-plications have emerged as a potential platform on which users’ mobility behaviour can be influenced in a more sustainable direction.
This thesis examines how a trip planning application, with a focus on sustainable travel, should be designed and implemented. To establish a foundation for the design pro-cess, a literature review explored persuasive technologies, identifying suitable persuasive strategies for promoting sustainable mobility and how these strategies can be effectively and ethically implemented within a system using persuasive system design principles. Rec-ognizing that trip planning is a complex process involving selecting destinations, routing, and ensuring the final plan stays within constraints such as a time schedule or budget, the literature review also examined key challenges in trip planning and features that enhance the overall user experience. These features include recommending destinations and sup-porting multi-modal and multi-stop trip planning.
To gain a better understanding of potential users' needs and motivations, a user study with 123 participants was conducted using an online questionnaire. Combining in-sights from the literature review and the user study, four general UX goals; sustainability, freedom, discovery and clarity were defined. These goals guided the iterative design and implementation of a demo trip planning application focused recommending relevant destina-tions along user-planned routes. Findings from an expert evaluation of the final demo con-cluded that the application successfully makes sustainable travel options seem more ap-pealing by recommending interesting destinations along the trip plan. To fully understand the long-term impact on user behaviour in real-world scenarios, further testing and develop-ment of the trip planning application, introduced in this thesis, is required.
This thesis examines how a trip planning application, with a focus on sustainable travel, should be designed and implemented. To establish a foundation for the design pro-cess, a literature review explored persuasive technologies, identifying suitable persuasive strategies for promoting sustainable mobility and how these strategies can be effectively and ethically implemented within a system using persuasive system design principles. Rec-ognizing that trip planning is a complex process involving selecting destinations, routing, and ensuring the final plan stays within constraints such as a time schedule or budget, the literature review also examined key challenges in trip planning and features that enhance the overall user experience. These features include recommending destinations and sup-porting multi-modal and multi-stop trip planning.
To gain a better understanding of potential users' needs and motivations, a user study with 123 participants was conducted using an online questionnaire. Combining in-sights from the literature review and the user study, four general UX goals; sustainability, freedom, discovery and clarity were defined. These goals guided the iterative design and implementation of a demo trip planning application focused recommending relevant destina-tions along user-planned routes. Findings from an expert evaluation of the final demo con-cluded that the application successfully makes sustainable travel options seem more ap-pealing by recommending interesting destinations along the trip plan. To fully understand the long-term impact on user behaviour in real-world scenarios, further testing and develop-ment of the trip planning application, introduced in this thesis, is required.