Supporting Self-Assembly

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the idea of examining the effect of self-assembly on the success of mobile health persuasive technology. The IKEA effect shows that individuals evaluate products assembled by themselves more positively than pre-assembled products. The IKEA effect has been proven in several domains, e.g., in human robot interaction, where participants who assembled the robot evaluated the robot and the interaction with the robot more favorably than participants who did not assemble the robot themselves. We propose that the IKEA effect exists in the context of mobile health persuasive technology and has high potential for improving users' engagement and long-term user experience of mobile health persuasive applications. In this paper, we describe the IKEA effect and its potential for mobile health applications. In addition, we propose an experimental design to analyze the effect of self-assembly on user engagement and satisfaction.