Systems and services we employ in our daily life have increasingly been
augmented with motivational designs which fall under the classes of (1)
gamification, (2) quantified-self and (3) social networking features
that aim to help users reach their goals via motivational enforcement.
However, users differ in terms of their orientation and focus toward
goals and in terms of the attributes of their goals. Therefore,
different classes of motivational design may have a differential fit for
users. Being able to distinguish the goal profiles of users,
motivational design could be better tailored. Therefore, in this study
we investigate how different goal foci (outcome and focus), goals
orientation (mastery, proving, and avoiding), and goal attributes
(specificity and difficulty) are associated with perceived importance of
gamification, social networking and quantified-self features. We employ
survey data (N=167" role="presentation">N=167)
from users of HeiaHeia; a popular exercise encouragement app. Results
indicate that goal-setting related factors of users and attributes of
goals are connected with users’ preference over motivational design
classes. In particular, the results reveal that being outcome-focused is
associated with positive evaluations of gamification and
quantified-self design classes. Users with higher proving-orientation
perceived gamification and social networking design classes as more
important, users with lower goal avoidance-orientation perceived social
networking design as more important, whereas users with higher
mastery-orientation perceived quantified-self design more important.
Users with difficult goals were less likely to perceive gamification and
social networking design important, whereas for users with high goal
specificity quantified-self features were important. The findings
provide insights for the automatic adaptation of motivational designs to
users’ goals. However, more research is naturally needed to further
investigate generalizability of the results.