RightOnTime: The role of timing and unobtrusiveness in behavior change support systems

Abstract

Influencing people’s behavior by means of technology is achievable under many technological guises from websites to mobile devices to activity trackers, making them practically ubiquitous. The timing of persuasive messages has been found to be influential in itself, but the omnipresence of modern computing also raises questions about the effects of randomly timed interruptions and perceived obtrusiveness. The presented research is an explorative experiment regarding the unobtrusiveness of a behavior change support system. The study compares two timing strategies: random timing and user-defined timing for system interaction. While the results of the mixed ANOVA analyses in this pilot study did not yield statistically significant results between the timing strategies, the correlations found do seem to indicate that random interruptions are perceived as more obtrusive than user-timed interaction. Furthermore, a correlation was observed between task success, task satisfaction and perceived unobtrusiveness.