Self-Experimentation for Behavior Change: Design and Formative Evaluation of Two Approaches

Desirable outcomes such as health are tightly linked to behaviors, thus inspiring research on technologies that support people in changing those behaviors. Many behavior-change technologies are designed by HCI experts but this approach can make it difficult to personalize support to each user's unique goals and needs. This paper reports on the iterative design of two complementary support strategies for helping users create their own personalized behavior-change plans via self-experimentation: One emphasized the use of interactive instructional materials, and the other additionally introduced context-aware computing to enable user creation of just in time home-based interventions. In a formative trial with 27 users, we compared these two approaches to an unstructured sleep education control. Results suggest great promise in both strategies and provide insights on how to develop personalized behavior-change technologies.