Designing Better Exposure Notification Apps: The Role of Persuasive Design

Background Digital contact tracing apps have been deployed worldwide to limit the spread of COVID-19 during this pandemic and to facilitate the lifting of public health restrictions. However, due to privacy-, trust-, and design-related issues, the apps are yet to be widely adopted. This calls for an intervention to enable a critical mass of users to adopt them. Objective The aim of this paper is to provide guidelines to design contact tracing apps as persuasive technologies to make them more appealing and effective. Methods We identified the limitations of the current contact tracing apps on the market using the Government of Canada’s official exposure notification app (COVID Alert) as a case study. Particularly, we identified three interfaces in the COVID Alert app where the design can be improved. The interfaces include the no exposure status interface, exposure interface, and diagnosis report interface. We propose persuasive technology design guidelines to make them more motivational and effective in eliciting the desired behavior change. Results Apart from trust and privacy concerns, we identified the minimalist and nonmotivational design of exposure notification apps as the key design-related factors that contribute to the current low uptake. We proposed persuasive strategies such as self-monitoring of daily contacts and exposure time to make the no exposure and exposure interfaces visually appealing and motivational. Moreover, we proposed social learning, praise, and reward to increase the diagnosis report interface’s effectiveness. Conclusions We demonstrated that exposure notification apps can be designed as persuasive technologies by incorporating key persuasive features, which have the potential to improve uptake, use, COVID-19 diagnosis reporting, and compliance with social distancing guidelines.