Through the Lens of Goalification - A Survey on Personal Informatics and Persuasive Systems Research

Goal setting acts as a mechanism for individuals to attain specific objectives, leading to an increase in task performance, engagement and, ultimately well-being. Currently, there is a variety of so-called goalification apps in different domains, from health to sustainability and productivity, supporting beyond simple tracking different phases of the goalification lifecycle, from goal planning to acting on appropriate tasks and analyzing the outcome. There is already a plethora of research in areas like personal informatics, persuasive systems, and goal setting theory, including several design space conceptualisations and system evaluations. This paper sheds light on these existing research efforts, by contributing a state of the art survey, for the first time from a goalification lifecycle point of view. In particular, both, existing design space conceptualizations and system evaluations are systematically compared to each other. On this basis, lessons learned are put forward, serving as a first step towards an overarching goalification evaluation framework which would allow a proper evaluation of existing goalification apps across several domains.