Sustainable mobility persuasion via smartphone apps: Lessons from a Swiss case study on how to design point-based rewarding systems

In the effort to counteract problems associated with the current carbon intensive transport system, app-based tools persuading mobility behaviour change have emerged worldwide. Most of such apps adopt a gamified approach and motivate behaviour change through external extrinsic motivational factors such as real-life prizes, that are attributed based on the distance travelled by non-car transport modes. Despite this approach might be effective in promoting additional leisure trips by sustainable mobility, it might keep car-based commuting habits unaltered, or even stimulate unfair app behaviour to gain points. In this paper, we focus on the Bellidea persuasive app, that was co-designed with interested citizens in a Swiss-based living lab experiment, and present how we addressed the shortcomings of prize-based rewarding systems, while also dealing with the constraints imposed by current levels of accuracy in automatic transport mode detection. We illustrate and discuss our design choices and the related algorithmic solutions by referring to the following dilemmas: “single transport modes versus modal split”, “trust versus control”, “dynamism versus rigidity”, and “global versus local”. We conclude by analysing real-life mobility data-sets collected by the Bellidea app and discussing our design solutions against their capacity to attract its target user group, namely car driver individuals.