Goals for Goal Setting:
A Scoping Review on Personal Informatics
*Honorable Mention
Published in Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) 2023
What did we do?
To understand the current state and reflect on the future of health goal setting with personal informatics (personal trackers), we analyzed 51 articles that use and provide design implications for goal setting.
Research Questions:
What goal setting characteristics and strategies have been used in literature on health and wellbeing in personal informatics?
What does current literature recommend about using goal setting in personal informatics for managing health and wellbeing?
Why is this study important?
Goal setting is a widely used and powerful tool in the use of personal informatics for health management in an evolving field.
Yet, goals often remain rigid (e.g., 10,000 steps/day), despite more nuanced tracking data and research on how to set novel goals
This can lead to goals are misaligned to people’s needs, abilities, or contexts.
Examining goal support in personal informatics opens new paths for design and research.
Method
499 initial articles identified
51 articles analyzed
Used a reflexive thematic analysis to synthesize design implications from our corpus
(three themes discussed below)
Six themes for supporting goal setting
Applied PRISMA approach to refine from 499 initial articles to 51 included in our corpus for analysis
Six Interconnected Themes & Design Implications from HCI Literature for Supporting Goal Setting
(three themes discussed below)
Goal Flexibility
What: Setting goal boundaries while allowing choices. The ability to make adjustments in goals in ways that support people’s pursuit of goals.
(some) Hows:
Goal negotiation
Providing a secondary goal (an easier fallback goal) if someone needs it (e.g., running late on a work deadline)
Framing & Reframing
What: Aligning goals to people’s interests, identities, and everyday realities.
(some) Hows:
Connecting long-term aspirational goals and short-term actionable goals.
Fitting to cultural contexts
Prioritization of goals – what is important for people to pursue now?
Reflection & Learning
What: Looking back at goals and data to learn about one’s behavior.
(some) Hows:
Demonstrating relationships – Show how one goal may affect another
Contextualizing past data – Put past data with surrounding activities to understand their perceived and actual behaviors to set appropriate goals
Self-experimentation – Test out different ways of pursuing a goal
What you’ll learn
Meet your instructor
Instructor Name
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.
Testimonials
-
![]()
“It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business.”
-
![]()
“It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business.”
-
![]()
“It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business.”
-
![]()
“It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business.”
