How User Experience Design Can Affect Motivation: A Study on a Real World Sport Application

Many researchers from different scientific fields are developing new strategies to foster individuals toward a physically more active lifestyle. In most cases, these strategies exploit new generation mobile devices together with social networks to augment their persuasive power. In our research work we focus on the study of the effects of these technologies on people’s sport habits. To better study this phenomenon, we are developing a software platform that aims at encouraging people to pursue a more active lifestyle. This work presents an experimentation conducted on Everywhere Run!, a mobile application part of the platform, that aims at helping people to stay active behaving like a virtual personal trainer. Very preliminary tests on the impact of the application on users’ motivations, show that it is perceived as a valuable motivational tool. These tests have been the starting point for this work that presents an interesting result that is closely related to recent radical changes we made to the graphical design and usability of the software. During a six months period, we observed a considerable increment 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 the effectiveness of the new design and bring us to another important intuition that we will better investigate over a longer period of time in our forthcoming researches: user experience may positively influence users’ motivations and their perception of the offered features especially in the long term.