The document summarizes a thesis that evaluated a social visualization tool called Stepgreen.org, which allows users to commit to green actions and view personal and social savings. The thesis conducted a study comparing users who saw only personal feedback versus social feedback showing community performance. Users seeing social feedback fulfilled more actions, suggesting social visualization can motivate sustainable behavior. Future work could explore competitive elements and applying this approach to other collective goals like voting, education, and healthcare.

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