Mapping Design Frameworks for Digital Behaviour Change Interventions to Goal-Directed Design

The use of Digital Behaviour Change Interventions (DBCIs) to form, alter, and maintain health-related behaviour is increasing in people's daily lives. Designing DBCIs for health behaviour change requires contributions from both behaviour intervention designers and interaction designers. Intervention Design (INTD) is a well-established psychological practice that guides the process of designing behaviour change interventions based on psychological theory. Interaction Design (IxD) helps design a digital product's overall structure and interactive behaviour, typically in line to the user's preferences, needs, and goals. IxD approaches such as Activity-Centred Design, User-Centred Design, and Goal-Directed Design (GDD) are used to facilitate the design process of digital products. While several frameworks are proposed to design DBCIs for health behaviour change, it is still unclear to what extent INTD and IxD approaches are integrated into these DBCIs for health behaviour change. The current paper aims to use GDD as a referential model to map existing frameworks of DBCIs for health behaviour change to identify to what extent and how these frameworks guide the combining INTD and IxD processes. Results indicate that all DBCIs for health behaviour change frameworks include the INTD phase. The specific IxD methods such as user research, prototyping and usability testing are reported more frequently in frameworks for designing DBCIs. None of the frameworks for designing DBCI for health behaviour change implemented any structured IxD frameworks. The absence of clear guidance for IxD designers who aim to design DBCI for health behaviour change represents a knowledge gap in the field of IxD. More guidelines on IxD methodology are needed to integrate IxD methods with INTD for designing effective DBCIs for health behaviour change.