Our team has decided that moving forward we will be trying to create an app that utilizes frequent nudges to help our users build the habit of spending time outside. From our baseline and intervention studies, we have identified a number of areas that our app can focus on from which we believe our users would derive the most benefit. These include Nudge Notifications, Weather Monitoring, Location Suggestions, Activity Suggestions, and Habit Tracking.
Our intervention study demonstrated that our users found it helpful to be reminded daily about their goal to spend time outside. To move forward with these Nudge Notifications, we want to explore increasing the amount of reminders, or placing them more strategically as opposed to just once daily.
One way these notifications can be placed more strategically is through the use of Weather Monitoring. Based on interviews with our study participants, weather was one of the most common context prompts that caused users to either go outside or remain inside. Since our studies took place in a particularly cold winter (for the bay area), our participants were often shuttered indoors for entire days at a time. Our app could take advantage of the widely available and accurate weather data to which all of us have access to suggest times throughout the day when users would find the weather enjoyable. On cold and cloudy days, it can be difficult for people to identify the 15 minutes of time where the sun is out. Our app could point those times out to users with well placed notifications.
One of the other factors that our participants discussed in interviews was the locations in which they spent their time outside. For many, even those who spend a good deal of time outside, the primary outdoor locations remained consistent. For instance, a lot of participants spent most of their outdoor time on the same route to class, outside the same dining hall, or on their dorm’s patio. We found that these patterns can reduce the perceived gain that our participants derived from their time outside. More varied locations lead to an increased sense of connection to the world, and an increase in the mood benefits received from their time. There are a plethora of awesome locations to spend time in on campus, so we want to explore adding Location Suggestions to our app to help people make the most out of their outside time.
In a similar vein, a lot of our participants reported a monotony to the activities they did outside. This can be due to mostly unavoidable factors like busy-ness, but nevertheless time spent only on transportation or recreational drug use reduces the perceived benefits of spending time outside. Just like with location suggestions, we are hoping to add a feature that would give users Activity Suggestions on different things they can be doing outside. These can simply be moving activities from inside to the outdoors, or be ideas for completely new things to do. Theoretically, these could be tailored to a user’s calendar and therefore be adjusted for each individual’s amount of free time and preferred types of activities.
Finally, no habit formation can take place without the user being directly involved and making a concerted effort. In this regard, we want to give users a place to track their progress over time, and take more of an ownership role in designing their ideal routines. Using Habit Tracking, we want to allow users to not just track their activities, locations, and amount of time, but also to choose their preferred types of anchor behaviors, celebrations, and much more.
