Exploring the relationship between Kinetic User Interfaces and exercise motivation in youth - an exploratory study.

Abstract

The aim of this thesis was to explore the relationship between Kinetic User Interfaces (KUI) and exercise motivation in youths. This thesis divided this exploration into three sections, and began by examining how the KUI could differ from other more traditional and familiar interfaces. This was done through heuristic evaluations that revealed the KUI’s ability and necessity to provide good continuous feedback to be its most outstanding advantage. Secondly, this thesis continued by investigating and eliciting the most prominent conditions for the facilitation of exercise motivation in youth. By both collecting original data through journals and discussing them with respect to relevant literature, this thesis concluded that the most significant condition was the inherent psychological need for competence. Thirdly and finally in the study of the relationship between exercise motivation and the KUI, this thesis proceeded by exploring the challenges of attempting to facilitate the feeling of competence through exercise feedback from an application with a KUI. This exploration was conducted using personas, group brainstorming, concept elicitation methods, high-fidelity prototyping, and user testing. The results indicated that this relationship was more problematic than anticipated as several challenges were explored, namely the problem with feedback overload, weaknesses in the user testing methods, and several unforeseen usability issues. Conclusively this thesis has provided insights into how KUIs are compared with other interfaces, how exercise motivation is best facilitated in youth, and it has also illuminated some other challenges that might influence the exploration of the relationship between exercise motivation and the Kinetic User Interface.

Keywords: Kinetic User Interface, Interaction Design, Exercise motivation