‘I Don’t Need a Goal’: Attitudes and Practices in Fitness Tracking beyond WEIRD User Groups

Niess, Jasmin; Woźniak, Paweł W.; Abdelrahman, Yomna; ElAgroudy, Passant; Abdrabou, Yasmeen; Eckerth, Caroline; Diefenbach, Sarah and Knaving, Kristina (2021): ‘I Don’t Need a Goal’: Attitudes and Practices in Fitness Tracking beyond WEIRD User Groups. MobileHCI '21: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction, Toulouse & Virtual France, 27 September 2021- 1 October 2021. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Abstract

Fitness trackers have the potential for fostering sustained change and increasing well-being. However, the research community is yet to understand what design features and values need to be embodied in a fitness tracker for long-term engagement. While past work mainly focused on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) fitness trackers usersin North America and Western Europe, this paper investigates another perspective on fitness tracking. We conducted interviews with N = 37 fitness tracker users in the US, Europe and Egypt to identify the similarities and differences in attitudes and practices in fitness tracking. We found that fitness tracking involved a deeper social context in Egyptian communities and our findings suggest that Arabic users focused on physiological measurement, while non-Arab Western users appear to bewere more interested in goal achievement. We contribute design dimensions that can help build more inclusive tracker experiences. Our work highlights how future fitness trackers should support a customisable spectrum of design values to offer engaging experiences to a diverse and global audience.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
• Faculties: Psychology and Education Science > Department Psychology
• Subjects: 100 Philosophy and Psychology > 150 Psychology
• Language: English