1. Motivating Community-Oriented Behavior
through an Online Social Visualization
Thesis Defense
Catherine Grevet ‘09

2. Thesis Motivation
 Social comparison places an individual in the
context of a larger community. Towards a
community-oriented goal, contrasting one’s
performance to others has motivational effects.
 In the context of environmentalism, feedback is
important to make people aware of their personal
impact. Providing social feedback has an even
stronger effect.
 However, there lacks research in the area of
displaying social data online (social visualization)
and environmentalism.

3. Stepgreen.org
 Developed at
Carnegie Mellon
University.
 The Stepgreen.org
website allows users
to commit to green
actions and view
their carbon and
dollar savings over
time.
 The current
visualization only
shows personal
savings.

4. Process
 Literature review on social visualizations, social
comparison and social feedback of energy usage
 Iterative design process to create a social
visualization that accounts for social comparison
 Implementation of the design using Adobe Flex and
ActionScript 3.0
 Evaluation through a quantitative user study at
Wellesley College

5. Design
 Brainstorming about what is motivating:
 What dimensions should people be evaluated on?
 Should we display history? Overall footprint?
 Should we make it collaborative or a competition?
How do we compare people’s performance?

RelativeAbsolute?
 The data we focus on measuring is action fulfillment (which
correspond to CO2 savings) of their committed actions
 People should be able to achieve 100%
 Unlimited number of participants

6. Final Design
Display of entire community for overview
Opacity for conveying performance
Different comparison levels
Anonymous
Personal time graph and action breakdown

7. Implementation
 Developed in Adobe Flex with ActionScript 3.0
 Application communicates with the Stepgreen
server through fetching and parsing XML files.
 Each user has an XML file with the history of their
green actions.
 For Wellesley College, each dorm has an XML file
with the users in each dorm and the summary of the
dorm savings.

8. Study
 Hypothesis: People who use the social visualization will be more
motivated to perform sustainable actions in their daily lives than
those who only receive personal feedback.
 Wellesley College dorm competition:
 41 participants
 All the Wellesley College dorms are represented
 21 in the social group and 20 in the individual group
 Lasted 5 weeks total (pre-study week and then 4 weeks)
 Participants recruited online and through fliers on campus
 Data collected:
 Survey data: entry and exit survey
 Stepgreen.org website usage data

9. Survey Results
 Transportation  Energy-related
behavior

10. Website Usage Data
 Frequency of visits  Commitments to new
actions

11. Website Usage Data
 Fulfillments of committed actions

12. Conclusion
 The participants in the social group didn’t change
their perception of sustainability more than the
individual group butthey did fulfilled more of their
green actions than the individual group.
 Suggests potential for this type of application for
environmentalism and other areas where individuals
should be motivated to perform collective-good
actions.

13. Future Work
 Implementing a competitive approach where users must be
the first to discover the image could have further motivational
benefits.
 Applying social comparison and social visualization to other
areas such as voting, education, health care has potential.
 With social networking and social comparison arise issues
such as trust and security.
 This work can lead to two directions:
 Environmentalism and HCI which is starting to gain interest in
the community through sustainable interaction.
 Social networking for social good: NSF has just launched a
$15 million grant in this area.

14. Work was presented at:
 C. Grevet, J. Mankoff. Motivating Sustainable
Behavior through Online Social Visualization. To be
presented at the workshop on Defining the Role of
HCI in the Challenges of Sustainability, CHI 2009.
 NEUS and CCSNE poster presentations
 Rulhman presentation on Motivating Sustainable
Behavior through Online Social Visualization
 Poster abstract submitted to BECC
 Thesis publication to be submitted to HICSS

15. Acknowledgements
 Scott Anderson
 Jen Mankoff and Robert Thompson (CMU)
 Orit Shaer, Takis Metaxas and Julie Norem