MyShoppingBuddy: Exploring Persuasive Strategies and Design Opportunities for Gamifying Real World Shopping Experiences

Gamified persuasive systems (PS) employ persuasive strategies to facilitate decision making and motivate desired behaviors. These PS have been shown to be effective at promoting behavior change in health, education, and other domains. In the area of shopping, research has focused on how PS can be employed to motivate healthy shopping, however, little is known about the efficacy of PS to promote other equally important shopping related decisions and behaviors such as shopping healthily, within budget and on time. This article presents the results of the evaluation of MyShoppingBuddy, an app prototype tailored to support people to make these main decisions related to shopping: shop healthily, shop within budget, and shopping on time. Specifically, we conducted a survey of 333 participants who interacted with the app, which simulated three shopping decisions and collected their feedback on the app's perceived persuasiveness, usability, and overall user experience. Results from the analysis show that overall, our participants found the app to be persuasive with respect to its ability to motivate them to shop healthily on time, and on budget ( p <. 001). Participants also found the app to be usable. Finally, based on our findings we offer design recommendations for future research.