Designing a Persuasive Mobile Application for Sharing Food Between Students and Restaurants

Abstract: Food waste is a monumental problem as food production accounts for nearly a third of greenhouse gas emissions globally and nearly a third of it ends up as waste. By changing people’s behaviors and attitudes, this surplus food could be eaten instead. Persuasive technologies can be an effective way of changing people’s behaviors; however, they may narrow down the view of sustainability if applied in a manner that focuses too much on individuals (among other things). In this thesis project the focus has been on how to best design a persuasive application that reduces food waste by considering the needs of both restaurants and consumers. Two versions of an application were created based on interviews with students and restaurants, where one of the applications included features based on Persuasive Systems Design (PSD). A user study was then conducted, where the users received a number of tasks to complete and answered a questionnaire on the PSD features afterwards. The results showed that both of the applications had a similar number of errors from the users during the tasks. Besides this, all of the four features based on PSD were rated positively by users, with all features having a mean rating of 0.83 or higher on a 7-point Likert scale