People are ready to adapt to a more eco-friendly lifestyle when they are aware of the possible problems of their lifestyle. Designing for persuasion works when feedback to a user increases awareness without intruding upon a primary task.

We designed two Mac OS X Widgets named “Coralog” and “Timelog.” They detect the duration of a user’s computer idle time (i.e. having the computer on without active usage) and communicates the energy consumption behavior. The difference between these two is their representation style: Coralog uses metaphor of coral reefs and fish, while Timelog employs conventional bar graphs.

We performed a comparative study of the two Widgets. We test how these information displays support the gradual progress of persuasion and how the style of visualization affects users’ perception of their personal data and results in behavior change. Our empirical findings lead to a series of design implications.

• The design description and preliminary study of Coralog is presented at Work-In-Progress, CHI 2009.
• Please read the paper.
• The full result and discussion of the paper is now being prepared for a publication.

Advised by prof. Brian Magerko (Project Studio, Fall 2008), co-project with Hwajung Hong.