Darby Siscoe
Wearables are body-mounted technologies that are both pervasive and ubiquitous. Most use sensors to retrieve and report data to users (Barfield, 2011). They use behavior-changing techniques to motivate users to improve their physical fitness. Fitness trackers are a part of the quantified-self movement, which is a social movement in which individuals take control of their health remotely by tracking it digitally.
This work seeks a better understanding of how users interact with wearable devices and what motivates users to continue to use these devices to enhance physical fitness long term. It proposes that users abandon their devices due to the following possibilities: aesthetic design, not understanding the data, usability errors, or social reasons, and seeks to uncover how these complex decisions affect the user experience.
"This work seeks a better understanding of how users interact with wearable devices and what motivates users to continue to use these devices to enhance physical fitness long term."
Researchers have conducted surveys and usability evaluations with users who have been employing fitness trackers for six months and longer to evaluate the experience users have. These studies helped uncover how a wearable device motivates users to keep using a tracker, but do not go into great detail as to why some users stop using their devices (Fritz, Huang, Murphy & Zimmerman, 2014). Another study reported on user experience for users who wore a tracker for a week. The survey-based researched differents brands and reported conflicting statistics that caused users to lose trust in the accuracy of their tracker. It also found that users had issues with comfort, as they did not want to sleep with it at night because they believed it kept them awake.
This study indicated a need for more “in the wild” studies to be conducted to understand specific shortcomings or strengths of wearables on the user’s lifestyle once it is adopted (Schlogl, Buricic, & Pycha, 2015). This research will use a mixed methods approach to understand how the quantified-self movement can inspire behavior change through wearable devices. Methods will include surveys and interviews to compare attitudes of users who have used a device for nine or more months with users that have been using a device for three or fewer weeks. Observational studies with new users will also be conducted in which users will be given devices to log their attitudes and usage of the device over one month.
The overall goal of this research is to discover how the wearable experience motivates individuals to improve their physical health and understand why users abandon their devices. The research explores how users interact with fitness trackers to achieve their fitness goals. Additionally, it identifies the breakdown in the experience that causes users to abandon their devices. By understanding how the experience affects user’s attitudes about the device, it can then be understood how the overarching experience can more effectively inspire behavior change.
The research will contribute to our understanding of how the fitness-tracking experience can be improved to encourage more long-term use and behavioral change. Future research can create heuristics specifically for fitness tracking devices. The effect of this research can understand the failed experiences users have with fitness tracking devices and provide recommendations on how to improve the experience.
Access the full paper here.