Aspirations

Design Hypothesis 1: Personal informatics tools that are aligned with users’ aspirations will lead to positive outcome expectations to engage with the intervention or the health behavior

People have different reasons for wanting to be healthy, and understanding those reasons is important to help them stay motivated when using health tracking tools.

Take exercise, for example. Some people are intrinsically motivated — they work out because they enjoy being active. They don’t need much encouragement because the activity itself is fun, interesting, or satisfying to them.

Other people are extrinsically motivated — they exercise mainly for outside reasons, like getting rewards from work or because their doctor told them to. The problem is, if the rewards or pressures disappear, their motivation often fades too.

Aspiration — a persevering desire that is aiming for something higher than one’s current situation. Unlike short-term needs, aspirations focus on bigger, lasting changes.
Toyama, 2018

There’s also a middle group. These people may not really love exercising, but they do it because they believe it’s important and meaningful. Even though their motivation comes from outside themselves, it’s connected to a deeper sense of purpose.

Interestingly, people motivated by a sense of purpose often stick with healthy habits just as well as those who simply enjoy them. We call this deeper drive an aspiration — a persevering desire that is aiming for something higher than one’s current situation (Toyama, 2018). Unlike short-term needs, aspirations focus on bigger, lasting changes.

Finally, aspirations aren’t just personal goals. They are often shaped by the important people around us — like family, friends, or mentors — who influence what we want for our future.

The idea of aspirations fits with Social Cognitive Theory (SCT). In SCT, big long-term goals (aspirations) are broken down into smaller, short-term goals.

When these smaller goals match what the user expects to get out of a personal informatics tool, they are more motivated to use it and benefit from it.

Altogether, this framework highlights why it’s important for personal health tools to connect with users’ bigger aspirations when they are designed.

Process

The figure above shows the role of aspirations in the Socio-Cognitive Framework. A user’s long-term aspirations are hierarchically derived to proximal goals. If the proximal goals are aligned with the outcome expectations of using a health technology, then the user will be more motivated to use the technology and get the health benefits. The dotted line shows the hypothesized relationship.

Design Recommendations

Recommendation 1.1: Support users to identify and align their aspirations
We recommend designing interactive tools that help people figure out what their big goals and dreams are — their aspirations (for example, tools like FitbitPlan (Lee et al., 2015)). Once users know their aspirations, health tracking tools can help them turn those big ideas into smaller, more specific goals — like setting a clear fitness target. The Tracker Goal Evolution Model (Niess and Wozniak, 2018) suggests that fitness trackers are influenced by both long-term eudaimonic goals and short-term hedonic goals. In SCT, these are seen as long-term aspirations.

Recommendation 1.2: Help users set realistic short-term goals, especially when their goals are tied to their aspirations or when they are comparing themselves to other
This recommendation connects the ideas of Aspiration and Data Exposure. The Fitbit Plan study found that when people’s fitness goals matched their big aspirations, they were more motivated — but they didn’t always enjoy the process as much as people whose goals weren’t tied to big dreams (Lee et al., 2015).

These negative emotions arise because missing an aspiration-linked goal can feel like failing to reach something very important. When that happens, it can lower a person’s self-efficacy. To help with this, we suggest designing tools that help users encourage users make sense of missed goals in a healthier way. This idea comes from SCT, which shows that managing how people feel physically and emotionally can help boost their confidence.

References

M. K. Lee, J. Kim, J. Forlizzi, and S. Kiesler. 2015. Personalization revisited: A reflective approach helps people better personalize health services and motivates them to increase physical activity. In Proceedings of the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ’15). 743–754. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/ 2750858.2807552
J. Niess and P. W. Wozniak. 2018. Supporting meaningful personal fitness: The tracker goal evolution model. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18). 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3173574.3173745
K. Toyama. 2018. From needs to aspirations in information technology for development. Information Technology for Development 24, 1 (2018), 15–36. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02681102.2017.1310713

Aspirations

Process

Design Recommendations

Further Reading

References