Designing a persuasive mobile application concept for walking meetings

Abstract

During the last few decades our lives have become more and more sedentary in the same phase as the technology has improved and become increasingly pervasive. Not so long ago both our work life and free time has been much more physically demanding whereas nowadays we must make conscious effort to have enough exercise. As physical inactivity is not beneficial either to our physical health or mental capacity, we need solutions that allow us to step away from our computers and have some time having some physical activity. The aim of this thesis is to design a mobile application concept that gives us the right kind of tools and motivational elements to help people find the ways to apply walking meetings in their working days. There are already multiple different physical activity trackers for mobile platforms, but nearly all of them are designed for individual sports tracking or overall daily activity tracking in the free time. As this application is aimed for the workplace context and to support the knowledge work while it is also persuading people to be physically more active, a regular activity tracker will not have the right kind of features to support the walking meetings in their entirety. This work presents how a workplace context differs from free time context when designing a physical activity tool and what kind of allowances and restrictions it sets. Another important part of the work is to show what kind of practical features and motivational features users expect and need from a walking meeting application in the working context. The theoretical frame of the work forms around the user interface design, Human-centered design process, motivation and Self-Determination Theory as well as Persuasive design. This knowledge is combined with three user studies that were done as a part of a research project. The three studies consist of a background study that collects the possible users’ initial ideas and expectations for the application, a Walking metro prototype study where people got to try the first prototype, and a four-week Brainwolk pilot study where people got to freely use the walking meeting application as a part of their daily work. The studies form a picture about the users’ needs and the context of use where theoretical framework provides information about other areas related to the walking meeting application design. Finally, this work presents design guidelines for physical activity tools in the workplace context and a walking meeting application concept that is based on the presented guidelines as well as other results presented in this work. The goal is to provide reusable guidelines that can be applied also other work related physical activity applications and also provide concrete examples how a persuasive walking meeting application would work in practice.