Adhering to preventive behaviours, like social distancing and wearing a mask, can help reduce the spread of some transmissible diseases; however, doing so can be a challenge as it requires people to break established habits. This challenge will be most evident for organisations as they need to ensure that all stakeholders adhere to preventive behaviours to resume in-person business operations. While various information systems (IS) have emerged to address this challenge, they remain limited in scope and fall short of helping users navigate the evolving practices and guidelines of a pandemic. To address this shortcoming, we adopt the design science research approach to derive design principles for IS supporting the breaking of established habits and promotion of preventive behaviours. The design principles are rigorously anchored in the habit alteration knowledge base and the Health Belief Model. We demonstrate how the design principles can be applied using an illustrative case.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.