Best Practices (and Stumbling Blocks) for Diversity-Sensitive Behavior Change in Persuasive Application Design

Design for Behavior Change can be used to enact changes on an individual basis or beyond to gradually modify users’ behaviors and constituting attitudes towards achieving a desired goal. Today, achieving more sustainable behaviors is a frequent goal of behavior change apps found on the market. In order to be effective across a wide and diverse spectrum of users and simultaneously avoid stigmatization or marginalization, the design of such applications should be done in a diversity-aware manner, which is often still lacking. In this paper, we present a best practice analysis of existing applications in the domains of food consumption, mobility, and energy consumption that are available on the market in Austria, Europe. We present the findings as a collection of three design patterns and discuss their status as patterns versus anti-patterns in terms of how well diversity factors are implemented in existing practice and where improvements are necessary.