[Sponsored Article]
Over the last few years, mobile fitness apps have grown significantly around the world. In the hope of increasing revenue from this category, app designers are working to add features that improve the user experience and drive better performance. Dr. HUANG Guanxiong, Dr. Crystal JIANG Li, and SUN Mengru, a PhD student in City U’s Faculty of Media Communication, surveyed 643 WeRun users and impacted the social networking capabilities of the fitness app on their participation in physical activity. I checked. WeRun is a fitness plugin built into WeChat, China’s most widely used mobile social networking app, with over 100 million active users. Like other fitness apps, WeRun tracks your daily steps and ranks them among WeRun’s friends. Users can also like the steps of their friends, and the app will notify the user about the likes they receive. This study focused on the functions of ranking and “preference” and linked them to the mechanisms of social comparison and social support. The study found that checking WeRun rankings and following more friends on WeRun was positively correlated with participation in physical activity. The social comparison mechanism seemed to be more dominant than the social support mechanism. Specifically, upward comparisons (comparing oneself to a more capable person in a particular task) have a positive correlation, and downward comparisons (comparing oneself to a less capable person) to physical activity. There was a negative correlation with participation. The more often users check their rankings, the more friends they follow on WeRun, the more top-ranked comparisons, and the more they participate in physical activity. This study has several implications for motivating physical activity and promoting fitness apps. The fitness app design allows you to send more notifications to encourage users to compare their actions more often. In this design, “You are … Source link
