TY - JOUR
T1 - Life After Weight Loss
T2 - Design Implications for Community-based Long-term Weight Management
AU - Wang, Jing
AU - Shih, Patrick C.
AU - Carroll, John M.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is supported by the US National Science Foundation (0943023) and the Edward M. Frymoyer Endowment. We thank LiveStrong.com users for sharing their reflections and experience, and also all the reviewers of this article for their suggestions that helped improve it.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
PY - 2015/8/26
Y1 - 2015/8/26
N2 - The pervasiveness of online health communities and recent exponential growth of health tracking technologies provide new possibilities for weight management, an important health issue that remains prevalent. To enhance the understanding of how to support them to succeed, we investigate people’s practices and experiences over the course of weight management, interviewing users from a well-established online peer-to-peer weight management community that integrates a calorie tracking tool. We find that support for weight loss maintenance was surprisingly overlooked, which we identify as a missed opportunity both for recognizing and leveraging individual member’s success and for enhancing community development. Our findings further characterize the changes people experience when they have transited from weight loss to weight loss maintenance. These changes of experience converge onto four facets, including motivation, goal recognition, social support, and social presence. We discuss the specific challenges and associated design opportunities these changes of experience afford for supporting long-term success of weight management.
AB - The pervasiveness of online health communities and recent exponential growth of health tracking technologies provide new possibilities for weight management, an important health issue that remains prevalent. To enhance the understanding of how to support them to succeed, we investigate people’s practices and experiences over the course of weight management, interviewing users from a well-established online peer-to-peer weight management community that integrates a calorie tracking tool. We find that support for weight loss maintenance was surprisingly overlooked, which we identify as a missed opportunity both for recognizing and leveraging individual member’s success and for enhancing community development. Our findings further characterize the changes people experience when they have transited from weight loss to weight loss maintenance. These changes of experience converge onto four facets, including motivation, goal recognition, social support, and social presence. We discuss the specific challenges and associated design opportunities these changes of experience afford for supporting long-term success of weight management.
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U2 - 10.1007/s10606-015-9226-5
DO - 10.1007/s10606-015-9226-5
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84937974494
SN - 0925-9724
VL - 24
SP - 353
EP - 384
JO - Computer Supported Cooperative Work: CSCW: An International Journal
JF - Computer Supported Cooperative Work: CSCW: An International Journal
IS - 4
ER -