Designing Data Visualisations for Self-Compassion in Personal Informatics

Journal article, 2024

Wearable personal trackers offer exciting opportunities to contribute to one's well-being, but they also can foster negative experiences. It remains a challenge to understand how we can design personal informatics experiences that help users frame their data in a positive manner and foster self-compassion. To explore this, we conducted a study where we compared different visualisations for user-generated screen time data. We examined positive, neutral and negative framings of the data and whether or not a point of reference was provided in a visualisation. The results show that framing techniques have a significant effect on reflection, rumination and self-compassion. We contribute insights into what design features of data representations can support positive experiences in personal informatics.