Understanding social needs and motivations to share data in online sports communities
Jarno Ojala, Johan Saarela · 2010
Web services that support exercising have grown more and more popular in the last couple of years. This paper describes an user interview study that included 20 users of three different online sporting communities that allow users to add their training data from their personal tracking devices. Interviews gathered users' experiences and opinions of the social needs and motivations to share data in online sports communities. The answers from the interviews were categorized into three main classes: social needs in sports communities, motivations for sharing data, and motivations for adding personal data to the services. Even though the primary need of most of the users was a personal training diary, they saw great advantages in sharing their data with other members of the community. As a result, this study gives design ideas for social features in web services and online communities that are related to doing sport.