Motivational techniques in training applications

Abstract

In this thesis I present an analysis of different motivational techniques used in training applications Endomondo , Nike+ Training Club , Charity miles and Zombies, run! . The types of applications that were examined in the survey were activity tracker, workout guide and exercise gamification. The survey was performed on a group of people of the 20-35 age group, which have a hard time to find motivation to exercise regularly. They had to use different applications for a week following provided guidelines and then answer the questionnaire. Some randomly selected participants were interviewed about their impression of the applications. I have analyzed how motivation affected intention to use different applications through Van der Heijden s model by adding motivational techniques that had an impact on different constructs of the original model to it. The important findings were that the impact of same techniques on motivation varied for tested applications, because they were of different types and had different goals. The results show that the most important and efficient techniques within the research constraints were gamification, goal-setting and exercise reminders. The results of this study provide the evaluation and comparison of motivational techniques used in popular training applications, which can be used either for further research on motivation to exercise or for development of a new training software.