A Balancing Act: Navigating Effort, Sustainability, Explainability, and Disconnection in Personal Informatics Ecologies for Physical Activity

DOI

Experiential accounts of personal informatics are important as they inform us about users' lived experiences with tracking technologies. However, these accounts describe experience at a meta-level and are not specifically related to how personal informatics is often composed of a collection of interconnected artefacts---what we call an ecology. To design personal informatics artefacts, we need a thorough understanding of how they are experienced as ecologies in practice. To this end, we interviewed 12 users of these ecologies using an interpretative phenomenological analysis approach. Our results show that users experience these ecologies through four aspects: effort minimising, sustainable tracking, performance explainability, and disconnection. We conceptualised these aspects as an automation experience---where technologies work collectively to minimise user effort while maximising insight. This conceptualisation provides a novel lens for analysis that can inform the design of more integrated and user-centered personal informatics ecologies.