The Digital Landscape of Nudging: A Systematic Literature Review of Empirical Research on Digital Nudges
My name is Kristoffer and I am going to take you through this paper
The summary of this paper is as follows: Our paper synthesizes peer-reviewed empirical studies
on digital nudging The results from our review
lead to nine future research questions that can be addressed by the HCI community
Over the last five years, there has been a steep increase in research output
on the topic of digital nudging
I’m illustrating this with a stacked bar chart on the number of search results
related to digital nudging across seven databases here
I will now walk us through some definitions that are important to the context of the paper
I’ll illustrate what digital nudging is by talking about its analog counterpart
A concrete example that highlights the inevitability of nudging comes from a cafeteria [2]
There is no neutral way to arrange and present the foods in a cafeteria
This leads the designer to inevitably guide the choices and behaviors of guests
This is what we mean by 'nudging'
The cafeteria is what we call a choice architecture when it comes to selecting foods
Digital environments, or user interfaces can be thought of in the same way
Now, nudging in the digital realm differs from its analog counterpart
in some important ways
A cafeteria or any physical environment has
certain native constraints that aren’t necessarily present in digital environments
Digital choice architectures can be personalized for individual users
and they can also be interconnected between users
We go into more detail about this in the full paper
Also, digital nudges come in different forms They can be categorized
In this paper, we refer to these differences as 'nudge patterns'
The full paper contains many examples of how these patterns are applied
in the literature
Here is a very brief summary of previous review articles on the topic of digital nudging
This table highlights that some aspects have not been investigated yet
In any case, I encourage curious people to read these because they have all
made important contributions on the topic
Now, the aim of this review is to investigate the characteristics of personalization and
interconnectedness in relation to literature on digital nudging
We will map the specific problems that digital nudges tend to address and
we will also investigate practices such as how how digital nudges are combined and how
they are evaluated
This leads to a discussion of nine future research questions that can be addressed by the HCI community
The methodology of the review is described here along a PRISMA flowchart
This shows the four phases of identifying the literature, screening,
eligibility assessment, resulting corpus of articles for the analysis
Most of the included papers can be found in well-known conference venues in
information systems and computer science
A concept matrix was then compiled in an iterative iterative fashion while the included papers were read
This resulted in an analysis of 73 articles where we counted 109 studies where we could
identify 231 digital nudges that were demonstrated and evaluated
This means that that one paper may contain several studies investigating
several different nudge patterns
Here, I am partially showing a large table from the paper that is summarizing
the codes associated to the included articles
Before I give some snapshots of the results and discussion
I will frame them around certain limitations The selected articles only span a certain timeframe
More scientific databases could have been added to our list
The keywords used also impose limits on the scope of our results
A different search strategy could yield more related articles on the topic
Also, the only source of evidence that we investigated was peer-reviewed conference and journal articles
We will now take brief look at some of the results and I’ll try to point out some relevant
future research questions that we discuss in the full paper
Here we are looking at how these digital nudges are distributed across ten patterns
in a bar chart
The full paper contains many concrete examples of how these nudges are applied in practice
Here we can see that many of these nudge patterns are not being applied in choice
architectures that we consider personalized and interconnected between users
This is shown with a bubble chart
This leads us to ask this future research question: How can the impact on users from interconnected and
personalized choice architectures be better quantified and understood by researchers?
Next, we are looking at a clustered bar chart of studies with a behavioral outcome and what type of behavior
change that is being addressed
What we see here is that many nudges are aimed at increasing a familiar behavior
or instigating a new one
This leads us to the following future research question: Is a given digital nudge as effective at stopping
or decreasing a behavior as it is at initiating or increasing one?
This is about the symmetry of effects when it comes to nudging
Finally, here is quick look at how digital nudges tend to be combined in the literature
Notice that there are a lot of knowledge gaps in this heatmap
There are still many questions around how digital nudges interact, do they cancel
each other out when they are combined or can they amplify one another with certain combinations
As a future research question, we’re asking: How do digital nudges interact
and through which mechanisms?
If you are curious more results and future research questions
can be found in the full paper
With that, I
thank you, for your time and attention.