Goals for Goal Setting:
A Scoping Review on Personal Informatics
(i.e., personal trackers)
*Honorable Mention
What did we do?
To understand the current and future of health goal setting with personal informatics (personal trackers), we analyzed 51 articles that use and provide design implications for goal setting.
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
Without development on how to better support goal setting, 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.
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?
Method
51 articles analyzed
We refined from 499 articles in our initial search to 51 included in our corpus
We conducted a thematics analysis and ended up with six themes for HCI research
Six Interconnected Themes 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.
Why is this important?
Allows goals to be adapted to fit everyday life
Supports people’s self-confidence to continually achieve their goal
(some) Hows:
Give multiple goal options so people can choose which goal they would like to pursue that day
Provide a secondary goal (an easier fallback goal) if someone needs it (e.g., running late on a 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 (e.g., motivated by an individual goal vs social cooperation)
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
So is that all?
Of course not - There were a lot of insights!
Email me to discuss the paper more: tinaekhtiar@gmail.com