Personalizing persuasive technologies: Explicit and implicit personalization using persuasion profiles

Author-Highlights•Persuasive technologies can be more effective if they are personalized.•We introduce persuasion profiles to personalize persuasive messages.•Persuasion profiles can be effective using implicit or explicit measures.•In three case studies we show the effects of personalized persuasion.

This paper discusses how persuasive technologies can be made adaptive to users. We present persuasion profiling as a method to personalize the persuasive messages used by a system to influence its users. This type of personalization can be based on explicit measures of users׳ tendencies to comply to distinct persuasive strategies: measures based on standardized questionnaire scores of users. However, persuasion profiling can also be implemented using implicit, behavioral measures of user traits. We present three case studies involving the design, implementation, and field deployment of personalized persuasive technologies, and we detail four design requirements. In each case study we show how these design requirements are implemented. In the discussion we highlight avenues for future research in the field of adaptive persuasive technologies.