Persuasive technology in cross-platform systems

Persuasive technology is a branch of human-centered science, which aims to modify user’s attitude or behaviour with help of technology. Persuasive technology is related to vast amount of other topics from human-centered science, such as user experience which plays a major part in successful persuasion. Considerations of suited methods to achieve wanted persuasion is essential in persuasive technology and the consequences of the used methods on the user. Persuasive technology is especially present in health-related systems, which aims to improve the users’ physical health. This can be done with various methods, such as by including social efficacy features to the system. Cross-platform design is the answer for designing application for various platforms. Theoretical background of cross-platform design can be used to solve user experience and technical issues. Positive cross-platform user experience has positive coherent user experience regardless of the used system component. Positive coherent user experience can be reached by considering the specific characteristics of cross-platform systems and by aiming for coherent system design. Technical issues include how the implementation could be done efficiently, how the components of the system are connected to each other and how the system could be maintained. This thesis represents theoretical background for both of these presented subjects. This thesis aims to explore and test the introduced theoretical frameworks for designing cross-platform persuasive system. By using this theoretical background, a prototype for physiotherapy was redesigned and implemented. The prototype’s implementation was evaluated: how well it fulfilled its defined goals and how the prototype could be developed further. Additionally the relevancy in the development process of used theoretical frameworks and models will be discussed. User studies for the prototype were not conducted in order to study how well the prototype suited for its purpose and context of use, or how effective and suited the selected persuasive system characteristics were for the system. However, the selected approaches for the design process including Model-Driven Development and Persuasive System Design model were found suited for this particular development of a prototype