Personalization revisited: a reflective approach helps people better personalize health services and motivates them to increase physical activity

Current approaches to personalization either presuppose people's needs and automatically tailor services or provide formulaic options for people to customize. We propose a complementary approach to personalization: a reflective strategy that helps people realize what matters to them and enables them to better personalize services themselves. To design this strategy, we first studied the practices of eight personal health service providers. We then tested the strategy's efficacy by building a Fitbit Plan website that encouraged Fitbit users to customize a plan or accept an automatically tailored plan. For one group of users, the website used the reflective strategy to assist in the plan setup process. A two-week between-subjects field experiment showed that the reflective strategy helped motivate users to carry out their plans, increasing their average daily steps by 2,425 steps. Without the reflective strategy, users either set easy goals or failed to carry out system-created plans, ultimately showing no change in their average daily steps. This work suggests that helping people reflect on and connect with their own goals in using a personalized service could advance the effectiveness of the service.