Description
This exploratory study investigates how mobile applications assist commuters with sustainable transportation choices. Our goal is to determine persuasiveness of two broad categories of features: emotional or informational. A controlled trial randomly assigned 41 users to three mobile applications: Emotion, Information, and Control. During the ten week study, we recorded user interactions and changes in transportation habits.
Several features distinguish this study from prior work, the most salient of which are: (1) automatic trip recording, segmentation, and classification; (2) statistical assessment of metrics that reflect a user's interactions and behaviors; (3) larger and more diverse samples.
Using hypothesis testing, we found that Emotion resulted in greater engagement with the application (p=0.006, 0.035, 0.031, 0.040) while Information improved the sustainability of travel behavior (p = 0.043). This suggests a combination of both approaches is required in order to both maintain user engagement and have an effect on carbon emissions.