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When a change in the way of working of a business is necessary, and new business objectives have been set, often some new information system or innovation can help reach these business objectives. Introduction of innovation can lead to difficulties amongst employees (Janssen, Van de Vliert, & West, 2004) (Cuervo-Cazurra, Maloney, & Manrakhan, 2007) (Christensen, 2013). We have introduced the Persuasive and Motivational Design (PMD) method (Self reference) to increase adoption within organizations when introducing a new information system or innovation, through facilitation of a particular behavioral change.
This article is part of a larger effort, started by exploring motivational techniques, like gamification, to facilitate employees in their daily job (Self reference). This resulted in the introduction of the PMD method (Self reference). Next, we conducted an evaluation of the method for its efficacy and adoption, validating its usefulness and effectiveness in practice. This was achieved by conducting a survey study amongst first users, and conducting a case study of a significant application (Self reference). Results of the evaluation showed that refinement of the PMD method was necessary: a particular ‘step’ in the method was considered not to contribute to the final design, and some suggested models in the steps regarding behavior where considered not be sufficient to map complex behavior within organizations. In the current article, we discuss the refined method and how we applied it to a new real-life use case.
For the validation of the impact of the method in real life, we selected a domain in which it was likely that a change in behavior would be necessary and the adoption of innovation would be a challenge. We selected a company in pre-fab construction industry. Most companies in construction have a relative conservative corporate culture. Clearly, this one use case does not enable us to fully validate the outcomes of the method in relation to change of behavior; the goal of our current effort is only to validate that our refined design solution indeed contributes to such a change.
The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 we provide insight in the results of the initial evaluation of the PMD method and how we used these results to refine the method itself. In Section 3 we discuss the importance of further validation and we introduce a new use case. Section 4 concerns the problem definition of our study, both from a researcher perspective and from a client perspective. Section 5 concerns the research methodologies used. In Section 6 we discuss the baseline established as part of the case study. In Section 7 we explain how we applied the refined PMD method to the client case. In Section 8 we discuss the interim measurements and the solution design based on the results of applying the method. Section 9 concerns discussion and a conclusion, and suggests future steps.