Motivating for behavioral change through smart nudging. Evaluating digital representations of psychological effects

Abstract

This thesis aims to study psychological effects and how to represent them digitally within a smart nudging system. A smart nudging system creates personalized digital nudges that are highly relevant to the user's context. How the system presents the nudges and what psychological effects are used is critical to influencing the user towards the nudging goal. The goal of the thesis is to find, implement and evaluate what effects can be used with a smart nudging system and if some of the effects are better suited for digital nudging. A design for applying effects towards a goal of being more physical active is provided, and a subset of the effects are implemented from this design. An evaluation of the implementation and the experiences showed that most of the effects are helpful for a smart nudging system. However, some of the effects are both difficult to solve and less useful. Difficulty refers to how hard it is to create and use the effect in a nudge, and usefulness refers to how well it can be combined with other effects and if it can be used individually as part of a nudge.