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to measure participants’ satisfaction with the effects of motivation (see Figure A6 in Appendix A).
For evaluating the effectiveness of adherence to exercise, the application also records all scheduled times and reminds users to confirm whether they completed the sport item at the end of the scheduled day. Next, the system automatically calculates the average completion rate of each person and all data are stored in the Firebase online database, which will be analyzed in a later chapter.
3.3 Experimental Design 3.3.1 Participants
In order to validate Active Track’s performance, the application is downloadable for free in the App Store and is available to anyone who owns iPhone devices. During the experiment period, Active Track was promoted in Taiwan (most participants were Asian). Apart from the free download, the research team also cooperated with coaches in gyms or personal trainers to recruit participants. The coaches only promoted Active Track to their students or a public audience, and were not allowed to supervise how participants used Active Track with a view to reduce interventions by coaches.
We finally recruited 166 participants during the two-month experiment period;
however, in order to avoid bias, we discarded the data of those with data that had 0 and 1 instances of usage. The number 0 or 1 indicates that users did not finish the survey questions from the onset or only used the app once in the first trial, which may result in invalid figures in the analysis. After filtering the data, the final response rate was 52.4% (87 valid participants shown in Table 3-2).
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Table 3.2 Summary of valid participants in Active Track Thinking
The study used the MBTI as the basis to identify the participants’ personality. Our research objective was to investigate the motivational effect of messages based on different personalities, and to understand how participants make decisions when perceiving different types of messages and adhere to their exercise schedule.
Therefore, we selected individuals with the “Thinking and Feeling” preference as our research target. All MBTI questions regarding this personality type were included in our questionnaire at the onset of the application (see Appendix B). The system calculates the total score of each participant to determine their personality type based on the MBTI’s scoring method (also see Appendix B).
3.3.3 Message design
According to Thinking and Feeling personality preferences, we correspondingly designed two types of messages–logical and emotional–and used them as notifications to remind users.
The approach mentioned in the literature review to design logical messages with the structure of claim, data, and backing, allows us to provide facts to support why users
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should agree with the claim that these facts are “data.” We then provide “backing”
by indicating the source or credibility of the data. For example, “Don’t forget to exercise today! Research shows that even one session of exercise will enhance positive mood.” Here the claim is “Don’t forget to exercise today,” the data is “even one session of exercise will enhance positive mood,“ and the backing is ”research shows.” However, emotional messages do not provide facts to support the claim.
They focus on triggering positive emotions. For example, “It’s time for your exercise! You are doing a fabulous job!”
By following the design rules for both logical and emotional messages, we selected 30 motivational messages for each type of exercise from online forums (see Appendix C). These messages are shorter than 128 characters in order to fit in a text message.
3.3.4 Test Design and Hypothesis
First, according to the literature review, text messaging is an effective way to improve adherence to therapies for specific diseases in the field of health care. Our first goal was to examine if using our designed messages to remind participants of their sport schedule was an effective method to enhance their completion rate. As a result, we set two main categories–with and without messages–as the foundation and formulated our first hypothesis as follows:
Hypothesis H.1: People are more motivated when presented with notification messages than when they do not receive any type of message.
Second, in the category with notification messages, we planned to further investigate the effects of message types on different personalities. In line with the theory, we hypothesized that messages that are logical, i.e., making suggestions based on facts and scientific evidence, are more effective in motivating people with a Thinking-type personality, and that emotional messages that promote positive values (such as persistence, optimism, etc.) and provide emotional support (such as encouragement,
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inspiration, acknowledgment, etc.) are more effective for people with a Feeling-type personality.
We divided participants in this category into two groups, which represent two relations between personality and message. One group was composed of people with matched messages. Namely, logical messages were sent to participants who were identified as having Thinking-type MBTI personalities and emotional messages were sent to users with Feeling-type MBTI personalities. The other group was composed of people with mismatched messages. That is, logical messages were delivered to participants with Feeling-type MBTI personalities and emotional messages were transmitted to users with Thinking-type MBTI personalities. Our aim was to verify whether users would be motivated by messages that match their personalities
Hypothesis H.2 (a): People with a Thinking-type personality are more motivated when presented with logical messages than emotional messages.
Hypothesis H.2 (b): People with a Feeling-type personality are more motivated when presented with emotional messages than logical messages.
The original group was set as the control group, which included both Thinking- and Feeling-type participants. However, participants in the control group received no messages. As a result, we set three groups at the beginning of the experiment. The participants were randomly distributed to the three groups when first registering their personal information in the application (see Figure 3-3).
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Figure 3.3 Test design procedure in application