• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.18-29
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• 2019

In the field of Human-Computer Interaction design, persuasive design has gradually been applied to the system development and design process, especially for mobile application design. However, most mobile applications have hitherto a very short using lifecycle. Especially, design features with long-term persuasive effectiveness remain to be further researched and developed. In this study, we focused on investigating and identifying the durative persuasive design characteristics through a data mining process and evaluating the durative effectiveness through a long-term observation process. Total five hundred healthcare-related mobile applications were selected from Apple iTunes Store and a mixed method was conducted to extract the most common persuasive design characteristics. Based on the results of extraction, a representative healthcare-related mobile application was selected as experimental subject. Total one hundred and twenty participants were observed during a six-months experiment and the monitoring data of app usage of all participants was collected once a week. According to the evaluation model for behavior change identification process, participants with habit formation features were proved to have a significant long-term perception level for ten persuasive design characteristics. Further interview research was performed to investigate the participant's long-term perceptions on those characteristics for the purpose of identifying the durative persuasions. The results indicated that a long-term durative effectiveness can be observed and healthcare-related apps designed with those characteristics could have durative effectiveness. This study may contribute to the improvement of future mobile application designs in user experience and durative persuasion, as well as bringing future benefits for both mobile application developers and users.