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The Younger Me: Utilizing Past Behavior Changes to Inform Personalized Persuasive Strategies

Alexander Meschtscherjakov, Magdalena Grtner, Manfred Tscheligi Christian Doppler Laboratory for "Contextual Interfaces", ICT&S Center, University of Salzburg Sigmund-Haffner-Gasse 18, 5020 Salzburg, Austria {alexander.meschtscherjakov, magdalena.gaertner, manfred.tscheligi}@sbg.ac.at
ABSTRACT

People run through different stages in their lives. Over time their behavior often changes with regards to a certain domain (e.g., driving behavior, diet, sports). Sometimes people realize why their behavior has changed, sometimes they dont. In this paper we argue that we as researches can utilize past behavior changes to inform personalized persuasive strategies. We could benefit by identifying and analyzing mechanism that already have been proofed to be successful. In this paper we report on a probing study in which we aimed to gather information about what made car drivers change their behavior in the past.
Author Keywords

lives. We believe that these episodes may inform the design of future persuasive technologies at least in two ways. First, we may use these episodes to get inspired to explore novel persuasive strategies or inform existing persuasive strategies with new aspects. Second, we believe by investigating which persuasive strategies worked best in the past of a person may inform us to personalize persuasive strategies for an individual. This claim has also been made by Lee [6] who states One way to optimize service is to allow people to customize the service themselves; another is to proactively tailor services based on information provided by people or inferred from their past behaviors. In this paper we report on a probing study we conducted in order to gain knowledge about past behavior changes of car drivers. We present selected findings from our study and describe what we learned about past behavior changes of individuals and report on the main reasons, which were identified to cause a change of behavior within car drivers.
RELATED WORK

Persuasive strategies; behavior change, automotive context; probing.


ACM Classification Keywords

H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.


INTRODUCTION

Throughout their lives people change their behavior. Sometimes this change is on purpose and sometimes it is unintentionally. Sometimes people switch their behavior back and forth (e.g., start and stop smoking), sometimes the behavior change is persistent, and sometimes it is for a short time until they fall back in their old behavior. Sometimes people plan to change their behavior and sometimes this change happens unconsciously. We believe that our lives are filled with episodes in which we changed our behavior. The approach we want to claim with this position paper is that it is worthwhile for us as persuasive researchers and practitioners to have a close look at these episodes in our
Copyright held by authors (2014)

There can be found a lot of scientific research on how personalization can support behavior change. We were mainly inspired by two scientific contributions. Kaptein [4] successfully claimed the power of personalized persuasion in comparison to undirected persuasion. In comparing the effects of personalized (only those persuasive strategies were used participants had shown to be most susceptible to in a pre-test) and not personalized persuasion in several studies, he proved the advantages of personalized persuasion. Kaptein et al. [5] claimed that differences in individual responses to persuasive strategies suggest the need for systems that rely on persuasion profiles: estimates of an individual user's susceptibility to different persuasive strategies. Busch et al. [1] developed and validated an inventory for measuring persuadability to selected persuasive strategies. They used the inventory to estimate susceptibility to persuasive strategies to personalize persuasive technologies according to the users personality based on self-reports. Their system shall help designers to make informed design decisions and to adapt persuasive technology adequately. Contrary to these studies, in which questionnaires and selfreports were used to categorize the susceptibility of people towards specific persuasive strategies, our approach is more

explorative. We claim that we can not only categorize individuals based on their personal persuasive susceptibility in relation to already existing persuasive strategies but can learn more about an individual if we take a close look into past behavior changes. In order to exemplify this idea we conducted a study in the automotive context. In this study we were interested how an individuals driving behavior changes over time. In the next section we outline this study in which we used probing to gain knowledge about driving behavior in the past.
STUDY

their behavior from earlier days, on the right side they sketched their actual behavior (see Figure 2).
Analysis

The overall research goal of the study we conducted was to identify persuasion potentials in the car to deduce implications for designing future persuasive in-car systems. Therefore, amongst other things, we studied drivers past behavior changes and the reasons for these changes to get insights on persuasive mechanisms that have already proven to be effective, and therefore, could have the potential to support other behavior changes as well.
Method and Setup

Overall, 16 experienced drivers (6f, 10m) aged between 21 and 69 years, participated in the study. For the analysis we adopted the essentials of the affinity diagram technique by Holtzblatt et al. [3] to organize the information we deduced from the probes. Within two workshops we proceeded as follows: One researcher presented one probes content to the others, followed by a discussion on the meaning of the probe in relation to the research goals. Each identified detail of interest was written on paper cards and pinned to a wall. When the researchers agreed that the information of the probe had been exploited, the process continued with the next probe, with another researcher presenting its content to the others. Finally, cards containing corresponding themes, ideas, and thoughts of relevance for the research goals were placed next to each other on the wall and grouped in accordance with the research goals.

To stimulate the self-reflection of the participants we made use of the probing method introduced by Gaver et. al [2] as means of communication between researchers and users. Thoughtfully created probes can enable users to access and express their feelings and memories, thereby providing the researchers with information on what caused the experience, and how to address these experiences with persuasive technology. In order to conduct the probing study, we conceptualized and made probing packages centered on 10 different topics related to behavior change in the car (see Figure 1).

Figure 2. The Younger Me: Storyboard of one participant.


Results

In this section we concentrate on the results we derived from The Younger Me probe. As stated before this probe aimed at identifying reasons why an individual changed a behavior in the past. Based on the returned probes we identified five main reasons why people changed their driving behavior. These reasons were: Figure 1. The complete probing package. The basic concept was to introduce the participants to these topics and then propose an activity to probe the experiences made regarding that topic. Topic 3 was entitled The Younger Me and aimed at identifying participants past behavior changes and the reasons for them. In terms of the probing activity, participants were encouraged to draw some sort of a storyboard. On the left side they sketched key experiences, such as car accidents or traffic fines; changes of available technology, such as automatic transmission, which facilitated driving, and therefore reduced the anxiety of operating failures and led to a more relaxed driving experience, but also such technologies as mobile services, which on the contrary lead to novel, unsafe behaviors while driving;

learning processes over time, such as the awareness that driving fast, and braking hard does not pay of in terms of a cost-benefit calculation; changes in the social context (e.g., a new relationship, becoming a parent); and an over assessment of ones driving skills, such as a loss of attention on the road due to a lot of experience in car driving.

persuasive strategies in the future. We would be happy to discuss issues, such as: How do we get access to successful and not successful strategies of past behavior changes of people? How do we know which strategy worked, when the actual behavior change was unconscious for the subject? Which methods can we use to identify strategies of past behavior changes? How can we make use of successful persuasion strategies in the past for personal persuasion in the future? Can we somehow spread/transfer persuasive strategies, which we identified to have worked successfully for one person, to another person facing the same problem?

The reasons we identified could now be used to trigger the creation of new persuasive strategies. For example, key experiences, such as the simulation of a dangerous situation, may be used as means for persuasion in the automotive domain. On the other hand, these episodes could help to draw conclusions on the individual persuadability. For example, the current social context could serve as an indicator for the potential susceptibility of a person towards a specific persuasion strategy. This information can be utilized to personalize the persuasive message.
DISCUSSION

AUTHORS Alexander Meschtscherjakov

In this paper we have argued that utilizing peoples behavior changes of the past could potentially lead to either developing new personalized persuasive strategies in the future or help in adapting and personalizing existing persuasive strategies in order to be more successful. Our work shows that probing seems to be a promising method to get insights into persuasive potentials within the automotive domain. We have found that past behavior changes of drivers can serve as a source of information when analyzing why these changes have occurred. This makes it possible to deduce implications for persuasive interface design. To design these adaptions, information on the context dependency of persuasion is needed. The probing method tuned out to be a fruitful approach to get access to past behavior changes. On the other hand this method did not go into details on how the behavior change happened. Here, other methods could be beneficial to gain deeper knowledge (e.g., storytelling, narrations, interviews). Another issues with our approach is that we only got feedback on past behavior changes which the individual was aware of. Subconscious behavior changes could not be identified. Overall, we were satisfied with the probes and how they inspired us to think about new ideas on how to persuade drivers. Nonetheless, we are only at the beginning of the process we outlined here. We hope to be able to discuss our approach during the workshop.
Topics and Outcome of the Workshop

Alexander Meschtscherjakov is a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Assistant at the University of Salzburg. He holds a PhD and a masters degree in Applied Computer Sciences. His research interests lay in human-computer interaction, user experience research, automotive user interfaces and persuasive technologies. He was involved in several projects dealing with persuasive technologies in different contexts (e.g., automotive, factory, shopping, office, home, transportation). He is also the co-author of papers dealing with persuasion at various conferences (e.g., Persuasive Technologies, Automotive UI, CHI).
Magdalena Grtner

Magdalena Grtner is a research fellow at the University of Salzburg. She holds a bachelor degree in communication science and is currently writing her master thesis. Since 2012 she has been engaged in several projects focusing on persuasion, with a special interest in the determination and development of methods, which could be used to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences hindering or allowing for successful persuasion, especially on an individual level.
Manfred Tscheligi

Regarding the topics and outcome of the workshop we are interested in the participants opinion on our approach to use past behavior changes to inform personalized

Manfred Tscheligi is a professor for the Human-Computer Interaction & Usability Unit at the University of Salzburg. He holds a master's degree in Business Informatics and a PhD in Social and Economic Sciences (with a specialization in Applied Computer Science. He has been active in the area of Interactive Systems, Human-Computer Interaction, and Usability Engineering for more than 20 years. He has done pioneer work in this field and established it within Austria Universities as a research field and an industrially

applied field. He has been leading several projects with persuasive technologies as a core factor (e.g. PEEM).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The financial support by the Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth, the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development is gratefully acknowledged (Christian Doppler Laboratory for "Contextual Interfaces").
REFERENCES

3. Holtzblatt, K., Wendell, J., and, Wood, S. Rapid contextual design: a how-to guide to key techniques for user-centered design. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers (2005). 4. Kaptein, M. Personalized Persuasion in Ambient Systems. PhD Thesis. Eindhoven University of Technology (2012). 5. Maurits Kaptein, Steven Duplinsky, and Panos Markopoulos. Means based adaptive persuasive systems. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, (2011) 335-344. 6. Lee, M.K. Designing Personalization in TechnologyBased Services. PhD Thesis. Carnegie Mellon University (2013).

1. Busch, M., Schrammel, J., and, Tscheligi, M. Personalized Persuasive TechnologyDevelopment and Validation of Scales for Measuring Persuadability. In Proc. Persuasive Technology. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, (2013) 33-38. 2. Gaver, B., Dunne, T., and, Pacenti, E. Design: Cultural Probes. Interactions 6,1 (1999) 2129.

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