Motivation that fits you: tailoring text-based behavior change strategies to individual differences.

In recent years, HCI research has increasingly focused on motivational technology to help people change their behavior. However, developing motivational technology that effectively supports long-term behavior change is a challenge. Solutions offered in the field are: (1) basing motivational strategies on existing behavior change theory and (2) tailoring the strategies to characteristics of the user. However, which theory or theory-based strategies can be used? How can we operationalize these strategies so that we can use them in motivational technology? And what characteristics should one tailor these strategies to? In this talk I will discuss an approach to address these questions.

Bio
Roelof de Vries is a former PhD student at the Human Media Interaction group of the University of Twente. He received a BSc in Artificial Intelligence, and an MSc in Information Sciences both from the University of Amsterdam.

His PhD research focused on designing motivational strategies to encourage physical activity that can be used in a smartphone application targeting users with any physical activity level. This means the design of these strategies needs to be global and broad, but also tailored to specific users. Therefore, the research aims to combine an overall framework of behavior change (the Transtheoretical Model) while tailoring to specific user characteristics (the Five Factor Model of Personality).