Discovering Design Principles for Persuasive Systems: A Grounded Theory and Text Mining Approach

Persuasive systems aim to change users' behavior and lifestyle. These systems have been gaining popularity with the proliferation of wearable devices and recent advances in information technology. In that regard, recent research aims at identifying system design principles that are specific to persuasive systems. In this article we extend the existing literature by discovering design principles for persuasive systems from a systematic analysis of users feedback from the actual use of persuasive systems. Specifically, we use grounded theory and text mining (topic modeling) to extract design concepts from online user reviews of mobile diabetes applications. Overall, the results extend existing findings by highlighting the necessity of going beyond the techno-centric approach used in current practice and incorporating the social and structural features into persuasive system design.