Developing persuasive interfaces

• Author(s): Lobo, Pedro Jorge Gonçalves
• Date: 2009
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/1973
• Origin: Repositório Institucional da UNL
• Subject(s): Attitude and behaviour change; Persuasive computing; Ubiquitous computing
• Document Type: Master thesis
• Language: English
• Advisor(s): Romão, Teresa
• Contributor(s): RUN

Description

MSCC Dissertation in Computer Engineering

Nowadays, computers are indispensable tools for most people. Since computers’ role is to make everyone’s life easier, systems can be built to be of even more assistance. While today people have to learn how to interact with computers, in the future, instead of having to do that, computer systems will be blended in our everyday things. It is expected that technology will come to a point where it is natural to interact with it like with every other object. Computers have been gaining their space in our lives being considered machines that can do almost anything. This master thesis has the purpose of studying how computers can be used as persuasive technology. To build persuasive systems it is important to know that humans are very different from each other. Given this idea it is of extreme importance that the system is able to determine as much aspects of the surrounding environment as it can, to process that information and interact with people accordingly. To achieve a solution that is effective for this concept, a study of persuasive systems is presented in this document. An architecture was developed in order to provide an infrastructure for the development of persuasive applications. An authoring tool was also implemented in order to allow the creation of context aware persuasive applications by users without programming skills. Furthermore, a persuasive application prototype was developed as proof of concept for this study. Usability tests were performed to analyze if users could successfully create the application prototype, named Smart Bins, using the proposed framework. Further user tests were executed with children, the target users of the application prototype, to evaluate its usability and persuasiveness. A description of the Smart Bins application as well as the results of the user tests are presented in this thesis. The results provide further understanding and new perspectives regarding the use of persuasive technologies as interactive computer products, designed to change people’s habits, therefore helping to improve human’s attitudes and behaviours towards important matters like environmental preservation.