Abstract

This paper reports on the pilot evaluation of “Power Ballads”, an evocative social media application which displays aversive feedback based on excessive household energy usage. Work by other researchers in persuasive technologies has previously suggested the use of aversive feedback should be avoided as it leads to a lack of engagement by users. This work evaluates whether punishment of non-desirable behaviour discourages users from engaging with a persuasive application. To this end we recruited 9 households to use the Power Ballads application over a period of 4 weeks. We found the use of aversive feedback did not act as a deterrent to regularly interacting with the application through evaluating user engagement.