Designing authoring tools for the creation of on-line behavioural interventions

Abstract

Behavioural interventions are used by social scientists to effect change in a person’s behaviour. The LifeGuide project is developing tools to enable the easy creation, deployment and trialling of Internet-based behavioural interventions. The use of on-line behavioural interventions is appealing as it can be more cost effective than face-to-face interventions, can deliver tailored advice at times that suit the participants, and can provide detailed statistical information that can be used to better understand behaviour or demonstrate the efficacy of the interventions themselves. The problem however is that developing on-line interventions is a complex, time-consuming task that often has involved high levels of specialist computing support in construction and delivery. The LifeGuide project is looking to put tools into the hands of domain specialists (psychologists, social scientists, health professionals, etc.) that enable them to easily construct their own behavioural interventions and deploy them on the Internet. This paper looks at the authoring tools currently being developed by the project, assesses their usability through case studies of interventions developed so far, and suggests where the project will look in the future to continue to improve the tools to meet the needs of the wide range of intervention authors.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jonathan Hare: orcid.org/0000-0003-2921-4283

ORCID for Ashley Smith: orcid.org/0000-0001-5312-1189

ORCID for Mark Weal: orcid.org/0000-0001-6251-8786

ORCID for Gary Wills: orcid.org/0000-0001-5771-4088

ORCID for Lucy Yardley: orcid.org/0000-0002-3853-883X

ORCID for David De Roure: orcid.org/0000-0001-9074-3016

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