Exploring Fitness Tracker Visualisations to Avoid Rumination

Abstract

Fitness trackers encourage users to set goals to improve personal wellbeing, but these goals sometimes remain unmet. Understanding how improved ways of communicating failure to meet fitness goals could help prevent negative thought cycles (rumination) and avoid reduced motivation for physical activity. To address this challenge, we studied how unmet goals can be presented in apps. We designed prototypes that showed unmet fitness goals. Radial and regular bar charts, single-coloured and multicoloured were used in the study. In a survey (n = 165), we compared the four versions and a textual description of the unmet goals. Then, we conducted followup interviews (n = 20) to gain a detailed understanding of the perceptions and feelings evoked by the prototypes. We found that bar graphs offered a significantly better potential for reflection and multicoloured charts triggered significantly more rumination. We contribute in-depth insights into designing systems that use goals and avoid potential negative effects of personal tracking. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI.

‘I Don’t Need a Goal’: Attitudes and Practices in Fitness Tracking beyond WEIRD User Groups

“…In an inclusive tracking experience, users should be in control of how much focus there is on achieving goals when metrics are displayed. This is in line with research which showed that displaying goals prominently could equally motivate and discourage personal informatics users [48].…”

Data Sensemaking in Self-Tracking: Towards a New Generation of Self-Tracking Tools

“…(Alqahtani et al, 2020;Ayobi et al, 2020;S. E. Fox et al, 2020;Heikkil€ a et al, 2018;Lupton et al, 2018;Niess et al, 2020;Pink et al, 2018;Pols et al, 2019;Potapov & Marshall, 2020;Rapp & Tirabeni, 2018;Rapp et al, 2019;Rooksby et al, 2014;Smith & Vonthethoff, 2017;Spotswood et al, 2020;Sumartojo et al, 2016;Thudt et al, 2018) Data handling Data curation How can I make the data ready for my interpretation? (Abtahi et al, 2020;Ayobi et al, 2020;Choe et al, 2014;Crawford et al, 2015;Figueiredo et al, 2017;Friske et al, 2020;Gulotta et al, 2015;Khot et al, 2014;Lee et al, 2015;Liang et al, 2016;Mishra et al, 2019;Petelka et al, 2020;Pink et al, 2018;Prioleau et al, 2020;Raj et al, 2017;Rapp, 2018;Rapp & Tirabeni, 2018;Rooksby et al, 2014;Shaer et al, 2016;Sharon & Zandbergen, 2017;Snyder et al, 2019;Thudt et al, 2018;Young & Miller, 2019) Identifying relevant information for data exploration…”

“…The richness of daily life cannot be holistically reflected in data primarily defined by STT (e.g., heart rate, distance, elevation, movement, etc.). In the same vein, some self-trackers do not like the idea of reducing their life into simple numbers (Alqahtani et al, 2020;Niess et al, 2020;Smith & Vonthethoff, 2017). Therefore, they actively contribute to behavioral data collection by annotating automatically generated data.…”

“…In addition, these studies investigate sensemaking in singular activities (such as sleep) or behaviors (such as a physical activity), making it challenging to transfer their findings to other contexts. Other studies that touch upon sensemaking practices mainly discuss these practices as a peripheral topic, e.g., presenting only one implication about sensemaking among others (e.g., Hollis et al, 2018;Niess et al, 2020). Still, the literature lacks a coherent, integrated and dedicated source on designing STT that support trackers in making sense of their data.…”

Self-Tracking and Management of Physical Activity Fluctuations: An Investigation into Seasons

“…Setting achievable goals can boost an individual's self-efcacy [5,16], especially in the situations when there is a high risk of relapse [17]. Unmet ftness tracker goals can result in rumination, resulting in reduced motivation and negative consequences on wellbeing [22]. Saksono and colleagues [26] also found that seasonality is one of the barriers to use the ftness app they employed in their study.…”