Reflection during goal setting: An analysis of popular personal informatics apps
Tina Ekhtiar, Rúben Gouveia, Armağan Karahanoğlu, Geke Ludden · Proceedings of DRS · 2022
Setting achievable, realistic goals aligned to people’s current abilities and needs is an important part of behavior change. Reflection is a critical part of this process, as it helps people identify and elicit appropriate goals. Commercial applications that support behavior change often use goal setting; however, we know very little about if these implementations are based on theory and how they support reflection. In this paper, we analyze how popular health tracking apps support reflection during goal setting. We found that a majority supported limited or no reflection during the elicitation of goals. We discuss our findings and suggest design considerations for improving how these tools can help people in reflecting and eliciting goals.