Beyond Limitations of Current Behaviour Change Apps for Sustainable Mobility: Insights from a User-Centered Design and Evaluation Process

Abstract

How can we encourage people to make sustainable mobility choices, reducing car dependency and the related CO 2 emissions and energy consumption? Taking advantage of the wide availability of smartphone devices, we designed GoEco!, an application (app) exploiting automatic mobility tracking, eco-feedback, social comparison and gamification elements to persuade individuals to change their mode of transport. The app features and contents are grounded in the transtheoretical model for behaviour change and were designed to avoid over-reliance on “one-size-fits-all”, simplistic point-based systems. The GoEco! app was designed in a user centred approach and was field-tested in Switzerland in a three-month experiment involving around 150 voluntary users. In this paper, we present the app’s features and comment on their evaluation from the perspective of the field-testers. The insights we collected through an online questionnaire and individual interviews allowed us to develop recommendations for similar persuasive apps and to identify open challenges for the future. In particular, we recommend to endow such apps with multi-modal travel planning components and features evoking the feeling of belonging to a community, that provide support and helping relationships.

Gamification of Sustainable Consumption: a systematic literature review

“…Notifications [41,48,51,57,70,85] 6 Chatbots [70,71] 2 Punishment [77,78] 2 Competition [20,21,42,44,51,59,65,70,89] 9…”

“…Within the articles published between 2018-2019 it was possible to identify various that relate to the same solution, like "MUV" [59,61] and GoEco! [51,57] for transportation choices, and WasteApp [69,74] for tourist behavior, providing a comprehensive picture of the rationale behind the apps, their features, indicators, and early results of the testing and monitoring sessions.…”

A Large Scale, App-Based Behaviour Change Experiment Persuading Sustainable Mobility Patterns: Methods, Results and Lessons Learnt

“…Consistently, it is endowed with a set of features and components specifically designed to support individuals in each stage of behaviour change. Since the app is largely presented in another work [34], here we limit ourselves to introduce its key features, following the overview provided in Table 1, and to show some screenshots ( Figure 1). Table 1.…”

“…The recommendations we collected through the final GoEco! questionnaire and interviews, reported in detail in another work [34], can be summarized as follows:…”

Promoting Sustainable Energy Consumption Behavior through Interactive Data Visualizations

“…An example of a gamified mobile app, which has been designed to assists its users to reduce CO 2 emissions and save energy through sustainable mobility [56], is GoEco! [57]. This gamified app utilizes the location-tracking component of a mobile phone to provide its users with eco-feedback and social comparisons, in an attempt to persuade them to use alternative (i.e., more environmentally-friendly and sustainable) modes of transport.…”