Fitness Tracking Apps Can Cause Guilt

12 Sep 2016 --- New research from the University of Washington showed that people who had abandoned personal informatics tracking like fitbit, experienced no real difference in their lives. However, emotions caused by the apps ranged from guilt over not being able to keep it up to relief from the tyranny of self-tracking.

"We got curious about what it's like for people after they stop using self-tracking tools," said Sean Munson, a UW assistant professor of human centered design and engineering. "Do they feel great, do they feel guilty, do they feel like they've gotten everything they need?"

The research team surveyed 141 people who had lapsed in using Fitbit. They showed the subjects seven different visual representations and ways of framing previously collected data, to see if the data could offer additional support and encouragement to be healthy if portrayed in new and interesting ways.

Half of these Fitbit users described feeling guilty about their lapsed Fitbit use, and nearly all of those said they would like to return to activity tracking. Twenty-one said they got no value out of tracking, found it annoying, or struggled to connect the data to behavior change. Five participants felt they had learned enough about their habits, and 45 reported mixed feelings about abandoning their Fitbit.

"People feel more guilt when it comes to abandoning health tracking, as compared to something like location tracking, which is more of a fun thing that people do for a while and move on from," said lead author Daniel Epstein, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering.

"We definitely don't think that everyone should be tracking forever, but we wanted to see if there are design opportunities to better support people who have had different experiences using Fitbit."

The data also found that most people preferred social comparisons that made them look better than their peers, such as "you walked more than 70 percent of people," over those that were framed negatively, such as "30 percent of people walked more than you" - even if the comparisons represented the same information.

The team also found that people who felt guilty about abandoning their Fitbit use were very receptive to recommendations that they return to tracking, while people who felt they had gotten what they had wanted out of self-tracking felt those same suggestions were judgmental and unhelpful.

The responses show, researchers say, that a one-size-fits-all design approach misses opportunities to support different types of users.

"Right now self-tracking apps tend to assume everyone will track forever, and that's clearly not the case," said co-author James Fogarty, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering.

"Given that some people feel relief when they give it up, there may be better ways to help them get better value out of the data after they're done, or reconnect them to the app for weeklong check-ins or periodic tune-ups that don't presume they'll be doing this every day for the rest of their lives."