“Ask yourself WHY you want to track yourself”: Co-Designing a Self-Tracking Guide with Teenagers

BSTRACTTeenagers often engage with Personal Informatics tools for health and fitness without support or guidance specific to their individual experiences. There is a lack of research on how putting teens at the center of designing educational resources might empower young users to harness the affordances of self-tracking tools that are of most value to them. To address this gap, we ran five online co-design workshops with 44 teenagers (aged 13-18 years) in the United Kingdom to design a self-tracking guide for teens. We focused on content, presentation of information, and distribution strategy. Our findings highlight the complexity of creating resources which adeptly capture the needs of this diverse user group. To successfully build interactive educational resources appropriate for teens’ positive engagement with health-related self-tracking tools, designers and researchers must prioritize teen-centered design with a focus on: (1) teens’ core reasons for self-tracking and (2) opportunities for social support and community-building.