Two Approaches to Increasing Physical Activity

It's been a long while since I wrote something. For quite some time there were no topics to write about. Lately I have been doing a lot of research into persuasive technologies and pretty much anything that surrounds the issue. While there is still a lot more to look into, I'm starting to form a clear enough picture.The topic I'm about to delve into should have a familiar ring to it. However, this time around the perspective is more informed.

It starts with an article by Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation: Classic Definitions and New Directions. We're hearing a lot of talk about intrinsic motivation from gamification... uh, actually, let's not go into terms. Just check this blog post by Chelsea Howe to get a reference point. In their taxonomy of human motivation Ryan and Deci place intrinsic motivation on the far right, opposed to amotivation in the far left. The implication is that intrinsically motivated actions are the most self-determined and the most likely to be carried out. This we already knew. What's interesting about this taxonomy is in the middle. Instead of considering extrinsic motivation as one big undesirable lump, it is shown to have different degrees of internalization. The leftmost type of extrinsic motivation is the antagonistic, reward-driven motivation called external regulation. It is the type of controlling relationship between the actor and the motivator that is criticized by e.g. Alfie Kohn in Punished by Rewards. 

Kohn's criticism also applies to the second type of extrinsic motivation called introjection. Actions in this stage of extrinsic motivation are driven by social approval. They are important for the person's ego. Although it is less externally controlled than pure external regulation it can still involve a controlling relationship between the source of approval and the actor. Praise is an ego-stroking reward that fits into this category. Or losing weight to avoid being mocked. In these two stages are dependent on external pressure. If the pressure goes away, motivation to do the activity goes away with it. People who have once been motivated through external rewards may fall below their base level once the rewards stop coming. In encouraging physical activity, it should be clear to us that this kind of motivation cannot be healthy, even if it works as long as rewards last. Behaviorists are not wrong, operant conditioning does indeed work - but important matters like physical activity should not be approached with a "whatever works" attitude.

However, there are two more types of extrinsic motivation where the source is to an increasing degree internal. What they have in common is that the activity's goal truly matters to the actor. Although they might not enjoy doing the activity in itself, they understand the importance of doing the activity because it progresses them towards the goal. Even better, they identify with the goal and it becomes a part of their ideal self ("I want to be fit to stay healthy" versus "being fit is a part of who I want to be"). The activity becomes valued by the actor and they feel they are doing it for themselves. In developing persuasive technology, this is where we should by playing ball. Of course it only works if the actor actually values the goal - if they do not, then things will be a lot more complicated. However, I consider that situation to be beyond what we can do with just technology.

So there are two fields where we can operate. The most common approach taken in HCI research is to aid users that are in the better half of extrinsic motivation - they have already established a goal of increasing their physical activity. In this domain, persuasive applications are helpers. It is their job to improve the actor's feelings of competence. There are a lot of ways to go about this. Simple technologies like pedometers alone fulfill one specific need of competence: progress feedback. Technology can quantify activity, allowing the actor to see how well they are doing. It goes up from there. Technologies can help to pick suitable short term goals. They can nudge. They can help connect with like-minded people who are going through the same things. The wealth of persuasive technologies that can be employed once the actor is at least somewhat motivated towards the big goal is huge.

The other field is where exergames operate. It's kind of like a shortcut. Because physical activity is a very broad term, there are a lot of specific activities within it. Exergames in particular aim to create a new activity that the actor might find fun to do. It is possible to jump from amotivation straight into intrinsic motivation if a suitable activity can be found. Dance Dance Revolution has been mentioned to death. Other popular examples include Geocaching. It's not just new activities though. Simply finding an enjoyable sport can do the trick. Technology can step in and help a person to find an activity they might actually like. This is best achieved by making it as effortless as possible to try out new activities. Exergames, especially mobile games, can have a very low barrier of entry (e.g. $1 for a mobile game that allows you to start immediately, or even free-to-play).

I believe that both of these approaches are correct. The first approach is suitable for people who are prepared to get into exercising but need a little push to start and a lot of pull to keep going. The second approach can work wonders with people who do not care about exercise and don't have any fitness goals. It is worth notice that these people can also get started with an exergame and realize that they actually have the competence to become fit if they keep going, which in turn allows them to assume a healthy exercise routine. Or they might want to start doing other exercise to become better at their game or sport. At this point we can combine methods from the first approach to help their training.

To summarize, there are two clearly distinct fields to play in regarding motivating physical activity. Both have their uses, and both have their unique challenges. Research has been done in both fields, but we're still waiting for a physical activity revolution to happen. In this field it seems rather typical that research prototypes do not turn into products, and commercial products are not necessarily up to date with their psychological research. There is still a lot more space for both research and new products in this domain. Oh, and physical activity is just one thing, there's more to come.

Saving the World. With Games!

I was supposed to write this post last week but turns out I actually had something more important to do. If for some reason you did not guess from the title, this post is about Reality is Broken (Jane McGonigal).

Here's a really brief summary. The youth of today are gamers. Almost everybody plays games at least to some extent. They are becoming extraordinary at something, but what exactly? Putting the emphasis on players of multiplayer games, McGonigal suggests that collaboration is one of their most important superpowers. However, they are presently using their powers almost exclusively in virtual worlds because the real world cannot compete. Reality is not a very well designed game. That is why, she suggests, if we could make reality a better game, we could harness the power of all these gamers and truly save the world. We could also design games to make these gamers happier by guiding them to do what are called happiness activities.

The book is really inspiring and I strongly suggest reading it. It is highly optimistic and you might find yourself not in entire agreement, but nevertheless, it is a compelling vision. Do I subscribe to it? Mostly, yes. I mean it is clear to me that politics has failed to save the world, so we the people must do it ourselves. I also know that it just won't happen if we don't make saving the world interesting. Even if we choose to look past McGonigal's optimism, the baseline she proposes in her book is valid: we need to get epic wins in reality. We need feedback and meaning. World saving is too often an activity that feels meaningless, lacking feedback. Feedback, how strange the way we always seem to get there.

If we return to reality (do we have to?), it would take some really compelling game design to make world changing games that people would truly want to play over the ones about saving virtual worlds. It is easy to get people already interested in world saving to get involved in world saving games. They have the initial drive to save the world. The bigger challenge is to get those people interested who could not care less. This is the part that makes me doubtful. Is it even doable? I'd like to see it happen but I'm a bit too cynical to believe in it just now. I think the same largely applies to any other means of trying to activate people. However, I think this problem goes away if we don't try to think too big.

The second part of McGonigal's book is the most interesting in my opinion. It keeps gamification on a personal level. The goal is to improve lives of people as individuals. Happy people are more likely to take interest in matters beyond their own. Depressed or other wise anxious people (alarmingly huge part of today's youth) are very unlikely to lift a finger. With projects like Quest for Learning I think gamification is an important method to return people to life. The first step in saving the world is to save us from boredom and negative stress. Only then it becomes possible to engage people in more lofty goals. The ironic thing about happiness activities is that people don't feel like doing them when they are not happy.

All in all, I mostly stand in agreement with McGonigal (and indeed, she says much of what I just did, just with different emphasis). My view however is less optimistic. I expect people to be self-centered. It might not be very nice of me, but I think it's an aspect that should always be kept in mind when designing. The bottom line is what counts though, and that's where I think McGonigal is right: games can save the world. They can do so gradually, piece by piece, mending people as individuals. Every small improvement is a victory. After all, we need to see our progress to stay motivated.

Goal Forming

The last aspect I'll explore in the flow series of posts is goals. This writing has a companion article I have written for Tiny Universes, which explores how rewarding certain kinds of behavior can change how a game is played entirely, using two games as examples. In general, goal forming is an important aspect of user experience, and on lower level also pure usability. The usability aspect is explained well enough on The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman) - in short, the user needs to be able to understand what goals can be set when using a given interface, and how to use that interface to achieve those goals.

When discussing achievements a couple of posts back, I mentioned they have more to do with goal forming than anything else. When a player plays a game, her first goals are typically to learn the game, proceed through its levels (or whatever) and finish it. There are of course various sub-goals while playing. Achievements or trophies often come into play afterwards and collecting them is another goal. It can also be argued that good trophies are ones that give the player some clear additional goals, which will increase the longevity of the game and therefore improve its value for money ratio. Case in point, before we had these modern consoles with their trophy or achievement systems, Star Ocean 3 had built-in battle trophies. It took me about 50 hours to finish the game, and then I spent another 250 or more hours collecting trophies (I'm still missing 7 out of 300).

In general, a good trophy challenges the player to play the game differently, introducing more difficulty. In Mirror's Edge there is a trophy that requires you to not shoot a single shot during the game. BioShock rewards the player for playing without resurrection chambers turned on. And of course Star Ocean 3 rewarded so many different and interesting things that it kept me hooked for a long time. Typically the only reward is a reminder in your account that you've gotten the trophy, although some games (like Final Fantasy XIII) hand out some minor gifts like operating system themes for getting trophies. Bad trophies are the kind that just require the player to do some repetitive thing a lot of times. More of the same is not very interesting, but doing the same thing differently can be.

Now, let's exit games for a while. With interfaces, especially in interactive spaces where interfaces can be abundant, it is important to get the users to form the right goals. By this I of course mean we need to assist them in forming goals that are relevant to them, assuming they are using our interfaces at leisure. In a work situation on the other hand we might want to introduce reward schemes that support effective work. Regardless of situation though, it's useful to keep the requirements of flow in mind: the user cannot achieve flow if he cannot set goals. So even before thinking what kinds of goals our interface should support, it needs to support goal forming in general. It can then be useful to do some research on what kinds of goals a prototype inspires in people, and then think how they could be adjusted, if necessary.

When the overall goal of an activity is fixed, the system should aid users in forming sub-goals that help them move towards the overall goal and stay motivated. If the activity can be split into a plethora of short-term goals, progress is easy to measure, and if there is flexibility in task order, users can also select short-term goals that are a good match for their current skills. In general, people split activities into short-term goals all the time when working but it definitely cannot hurt to make systems that support keeping track of these goals, and that can also suggest goals.

Before achievements and trophies entered the life of gamers, people used to make up their own challenges. These were definitely no less interesting, but of course no one was certain whether a challenge would be possible at all until someone completed it. With formal trophies, game developers can design the challenges and ensure that they are indeed possible to reach (although, some of the craziest ones are almost unreachable). So for example, in order to improve my writing, I could use a text editor that has various trophies for using language in special ways, like "use 5 different synonyms for a common word in one article". Of course I can make up all these challenges myself, or search the internet, but if it is in fact built into my interface, they are constantly present and easily available for viewing.

Overall, goal forming is a highly relevant topic for user experience. I have once again just scratched the surface, but already discovered at least two important aspects of it. The first one is to gain an understanding of what goals users can form when using your interface. The second one is guiding users to form goals that are constructive towards the overall goal of a larger activity. If every phase of an activity can has its own short-term goal, the user experience is likely to improve. This is too often not the case when viewing the learning curves of more complex applications.

Difficulty Regulation

Lumines got me again. I hadn't played it for a while, and then yesterday I decided to sink my teeth in once again. It had one mode I hadn't really tackled before: a puzzle mode where the aim is not to score points, but to form various shapes of one color from the blocks. The reason I hadn't tried it before was that I had to actually check the internet to understand how I'm supposed to form those shapes. So there's a quick lesson: sometimes instructions are simply needed. But that is not the topic today. There is a reason I mentioned Lumines and the puzzle mode though, and we'll get to it soon enough.

Difficulty regulation strategies in games are important tools for keeping the player in flow. One quite obvious strategy is to simply include multiple difficulty modes to play the game in, allowing the player to choose a mode he deems suitable for himself. Of course, one problem is: how can the player know which one to pick? Sometimes descriptions can help, such as BioShock's "Choose this if you have never played first person shooters before" description for its easy mode. This is a relatively simple strategy to implement and has the benefit of hugely improving a game's life cycle for advanced players. The only thing a game designer needs to worry about is making the correct adjustments to make the feel more difficult but not unfair. Also, players might need some encouragement that after finishing the game, their skills are on the level needed to tackle the more difficult mode.

Difficulty increase built into progression in the game is most likely the most common way. The next level is typically more difficult than the one before it. Yet it is not always easy to design a suitable difficulty ramp. In many games, some of the most challenging moments are somewhere in the middle - towards the end, player skills and character powers are becoming too big for the challenge. Another thing is that the difficulty curve should not be a ramp. I think it's important to drop in tasks that are a bit more lenient than the previous ones. This way the player, after mastering some tough challenge, can actually feel that he has gotten better, as problems that are still much harder than the first ones are becoming easy. This is exactly how the puzzle mode in Lumines got me so addicted. Every time I succeeded at a hard problem, the next ones felt like a breeze and got me to play more and more. When the next harder problem hit, I already had felt the satisfaction of success, and I was mentally prepared to face it.

Finally there's dynamic difficulty regulation. In this case, the game uses some mechanism to figure out when the player is not doing too good, and then proceeds to make the game easier. Sometimes this difficulty reduction is invisible, affecting only numbers inside the game's engine or reducing the effectiveness of artificial intelligence - other times it is more visible, when the game reduces the challenge itself by introducing fewer enemies for example. So essentially the game cheats for the player's advantage. This is quite typical in tabletop role-playing games as well when the game master makes his die rolls in secret, and can then freely adjust the result to keep the game more enjoyable. The problem with this approach is that some players might indeed feel cheated out of the challenge. Frankly, they don't appreciate your concern. Personally I think there should always be the option to turn dynamic difficulty regulation off.

Finally, multi-player games where players compete with each other are difficulty regulated by player skill. In these games, one important aspect is to try and match players with somewhat equal skill levels to keep everyone in the flow zone (i.e. not bored and not frustrated).

So, these are the most typical ways games do their best to keep players in flow. Can these strategies be used for real-life applications and tasks? It does seem to highly depend on the task. Difficulty is typically in the task itself, so we really cannot touch it. What applications can do though is to suggest a good task order for the user, based on past performance and statistics. This way users can more easily find tasks that match their skills. This approach does seem more suitable for tasks that are part of hobbies - at work the list of available tasks is often narrow, and there is not much choice in what to do and when.

One other way applications can do difficulty regulation is the level of automation, which I have already discussed in an earlier post. At first, tasks can be done in less detail, relying more on the application to work its best guess magic. When the user becomes more familiar with the application and tasks, more and more control is placed in the user's hands. Of course, the user will need full capability to override the machine's decision at any time, regardless of "difficulty mode".

I guess that's it for today.

Achieving Something... But What?

In going through the three topics I mentioned in the post on Flow, I'll start with the last one. Today, I'm going to talk about achievements - a particular kind of feedback present in both real life and games. Truth be told, I'm mostly going to talk about games, but you probably already guessed that anyway.

These days, games feature quite literal achievements in form of, well, achievements (XBox Live) or trophies (PlayStation Network) etc. These are built-in goals attached to the games, which can be pursued in addition to simply finishing the game. Some are quite trivial to get and usually gotten without any extra effort. These are not of much interest, as they do not motivate the player to do any extra work. The interesting ones are those that give players more reason to play the game beyond finishing it such as "Finish the game without firing a single shot", "Collect all secret items", "Defeat ultrahardbossmonsterofthemonth" and so on. However, it does seem that these kinds of achievements have more to do with setting goals than feedback. They are of limited use in measuring progress, but it's strictly on/off.

For the purposes of this topic, high scores and time attacks are of more interest. Both are ways of getting feedback immediately after the fact, and even during playing (if score/time is displayed). Hitting a better score or time is a clear sign of improvement - especially if you are improving your average result over time. Another quite similar way to measure one's own progress in a game is to see how far you get before game over. This is especially true in games that never really end, and the only real goal is to get better/faster/further (like Lumines Supernova, discussed in detail earlier). Similar measuring of real world tasks is possible as well, and at least one example was even mentioned in Flow. Of course, this kind of progress measurement works best with tasks that are repeated more than once. My job, for example, has little repetition. I don't write the same software twice or write the same article twice (unless I miserably fail with backups). I can optimize my software though.

Another quite similar method is measuring success in relation to others. Ranking lists, or in activities that support competition, win rates against different opponents work similarly. Of course, this way you are measuring your progress in relation to others and theoretically it's possible not to notice any improvement, assuming everyone progresses at the same rate (but of course in real life this is never the case). Competition also has some possible negative side effects (not everyone likes to compete), which is not the case when using scores or times to simply measure your own progress (of course, if you start comparing results with others, enter competition). I definitely do think everyone should have the benefit of privacy in measuring their progress.

The first step to take advantage of scoring-based feedback is to apply it to interfaces that are used for repeated tasks. The key is to make feedback easily accessible for those who want it. It is once again important to recognize that not everyone wants to be measured in this way. Another important point is to create a scoring system that encourages the best ways of doing the task. For other tasks that are not so easy to score (or time), providing statistics that can help the user make up his own scoring system could still be a useful way of providing more feedback. I for example am among people who are interested in the statistics of their own actions. Which word I use most in my blog? Do I have some preferred programming habits? Maybe I'd like to improve my vocabulary and start using more synonyms - getting statistics could empower me to do this.

So extending feedback beyond what the system is using, including statistics or measurements of user behavior into the application, is one direction I think should be explored more widely than it currently is. I also do think it is one step towards applications that are more supportive of flow activities.

The Emotionality of Fuzzy Things

As you might be able to guess from the title, I've also been reading Emotional Design (Don Norman). Like with the other book, this was my second read-through. What I realized while reading this time around, is that this particular book is perhaps the most essential one for my research. Indeed, most of the things I have been writing about can be derived from what Norman presents in these pages.

Playful usability definitely builds upon the emotional side of human thought. It doesn't even pretend to be functionally optimal. Highly functional interfaces are effective. They take the shortest route. Playful interfaces on the other hand are more creative. Or, using the travel metaphor, they take the scenic route. Or maybe the route that is just more entertaining to drive. Really straight, long roads are effective. They are also really boring to drive, which is why I usually don't pick them. So today, I'll take a look at playful interfaces, through the lenses of the three levels of human thought presented in the book.

I guess before that, a really quick recap of the said levels is in order. For a more complete description, read the book. The three levels of human thought are visceral, behavioral and reflective. The first two are sub-conscious while the last one is conscious thought. Visceral level is the most basic input-output system built into us. It excels at giving out immediate responses. The behavioral level is where activity is performed. It handles any activity that doesn't require conscious thought to perform. While I'm writing this, the movements of my hands on the keyboard are controlled by the behavioral level, leaving my consciousness free to think ahead what I'll write next. And of course, that is what I'm doing on the reflective level. Here I am making decisions how to express myself and my ideas through this text.

Playful interfaces are by nature likely to be more novel than highly functional ones. Sure, functional interfaces can be decorated, but the methods of interaction follow convention. Playful or fuzzy interfaces can surprise the user with more than just visual decorations. At this point, we are clearly working on the visceral level. And I think it's really important to be affective here. It's the wow-effect, "hey, I wanna try that", that should be achieved. Applications and services need to advertise themselves, especially in interactive spaces where high personalization is not affordable (i.e. same services are generally offered for everyone). Often one glimpse at the UI is all you're ever going to get from your potential users, so that glimpse better bring them over. This kind of appeal is especially important to make people aware of services they didn't think they'd need.

As stated, playful interfaces are not even trying to compete in raw functionality. The argument goes: effectiveness can be achieved through enjoyable use, even if the actions themselves are slower. People are not machines, we get bored with uninteresting tasks and our minds wander away. This should not be big news to anyone, hopefully. Take a look at games. Games rarely provide the most effective means to reach a high level goal, which does indeed make them enjoyable. So, in the behavioral level, the aim for playful usability is to make high level goals more enjoyable to work towards. The means towards this end is to make individual tasks not necessarily optimized for speed, but optimized for fun instead.

Of course, making work-related tasks fun while retaining their original purpose is a hard one to tackle. If it was easy, we would most likely have it already. It requires a lot of lateral thinking. Especially in the domain of desktop applications, user interfaces are inside that same old ugly box. I've said this before, but it's worth repeating: that box needs to be tucked away for good. Thinking outside that box is not enough. We must find a new box altogether and then think outside that box. Or, preferably, a lot of boxes solely for the purpose of thinking outside them. Or, well, you get the idea. Just to put things in context, I have picked up the box labeled "game interfaces" and I'm trying to think outside that box.

I'm actually a bit of an optimist in the sense that I firmly believe that for playful interfaces, visceral appeal might be achieved as a side product of good behavioral appeal. At least I'd like to think that most things that are fun to do, also look so. Sure, I can come up with counter examples. However, at least in the beginning novelty is the other factor. Interfaces that are fun to use will most likely look very different from what people are used to, leading into curiosity. There lies a risk though. Control by gestures or speech for example can feel weird to some people. Especially if they have to do it in public. Talking on the phone is easy to accept. Talking to the phone is not.

Finally, we have the reflective level. I'd consider this to be even more important than the other two, but also harder to write about. Certainly, a good user experience is already achieved with enjoyable execution of tasks. On the reflective level, we want users to look back at the experience with positive feelings. Also, we need the user to feel good while using the interface. If we jump back to games, it simply doesn't matter how good playability a game has if it doesn't match the style or theme of the game. Therefore, it is important that a playful interface contributes to the overall experience of performing a higher level goal. And of course, how using the interface sits with the user's self-image.

Taking emotions into the equation raises a whole lot of things to consider when designing playful interaction. User experience is not a simple matter. Even in pure entertainment applications such as games, no one can tell exactly what needs to be done to ensure that ultimate playing experience. Sure, reading a book or ten about game design helps. Reading books on related topics helps more. But in the end, it all comes down to understanding your audience. Even then, sometimes you just have to break the rules, shake people up and bewilder them completely.

Making an experimental interface is easy. Making a successful experimental interface is not. That's what keeps researches like myself ticking.

Irrationality and What Should We Do with it

Time to discuss some stuff I've read from books recently. The first book is Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. It's actually a book for behavioral economics, but can tell a lot about how we humans are wired for anyone in any field. Because it's also quite fun, not too long and well-written, I can recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in human behavior.

In the book, Ariely discusses a lot of different types of circumstances where humans repeatedly fail in rational thinking. Hence the name. A lot of the stuff is actually really familiar for most of us, because we've been down those roads. The book does a good job of pointing out the circumstances where people make bad decisions. If people became more aware of these things, maybe they could make better decisions in the future. Who knows, right? For someone in the HCI field, and game design as well, every tidbit of knowledge about human behavior is valuable. Here are some thoughts I gathered while reading:

Actually my first thoughts were whether we could actually use this kind of irrational behavior to purposefully "deceive" the users. For game design, it's also helpful to know how people form their decisions in different circumstances. This way players could be guided implicitly instead of explicitly when the designer would really like the them to pick a certain option. Most players would likely end up picking the intended option, but they would still think they are firmly on the driver's seat. Actually I think it would be an interesting for game researches to analyze how decision making situations are staged in games (although they may have also done this kind of research already).

And what about interfaces? It's kind of a harder case. Here the designer doesn't want to guide the user into doing something. The idea is for users to get what they want, which is something we really cannot predict. I don't have any particular ideas yet, but I'd like to explore the concept of purposeful deception in usability to produce outcomes that make for a better user experience. Maybe it's a dead end but you never know before you try.

Then again, should we exploit irrationality? After all, it causes people to make bad decisions that can be really damaging to themselves in the long run. Perhaps it would actually be better to make games and applications that highlight our irrationality and make us aware of how it affects us even in situations we consider "too important to fail". Some games do require players to abandon certain types of irrational behavior. A lot of board games for example encourage players to make hard decisions instead of keeping all the options open. In order to win, players need to commit to a strategy sooner or later. It promotes simple folklore wisdom; "if you run after two hares you will catch neither".

This I think is another interesting topic where games could be used for teaching people, more effectively than most learning methods. After all, games are good for experimentation, because players don't lose anything permanently (in most games anyway). Of course therein lies a problem as well: we think differently when we know there is nothing to lose. So even if we learn to avoid our irrational behavior in a virtual world, does this wisdom transfer into real life, where losses are also real? It might be a tough challenge to come up with something that produces real benefit, but something that should be considered.

We are already coming up with games and applications that encourage people to exercise and look after their health etc. Should improving our thinking be the next step? After all, it is our thinking that's the root of everything else.

(I've also re-read Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things but it's something I'll get back to later.)