Assessing the User Experience Design as a Persuasive Methodology in a Real World Sport Application

In the last years, researchers are experimenting with innovative methodologies to help people in their daily training routines. Our research activity focuses on the study of the effects of the former technologies on people's sport habits. This work describes an experimentation conducted on Everywhere Run! (EWRun), a mobile application part of a bigger platform, that aims at helping people to stay active behaving like a virtual personal trainer. In this work we show some interesting results that arise from recent radical changes we made to the software usability and its graphical design. We observed a considerable increment of the user base and, as a consequence, of the total number of daily trainings. To statistically prove the effectiveness of the redesign, we decided to compare the two versions of the application. The results confirm its effectiveness in terms of usability and brought us to investigate how the new design is affecting user motivation by means of a custom questionnaire and a well known motivation assessment tool. The positive result observed will be the starting point of our forthcoming researches: we aim at further validating the results presented in this work over a longer period of time and over a larger number of real users.