Family vs. individual profiles in a health portal: strengths and weaknesses

Our research aims at helping families work together to achieve a healthier lifestyle, increasing their awareness of what they currently do and what they could do differently. We built a prototype collaborative platform for families to see if we could facilitate health discussions and encourage supportive behaviour within the family. This paper presents a trial we conducted online where we investigated what would be more promising: an individual profile, space and goal, for each individual in a family, or a family profile, space and goal. We show that both conditions have their strengths and weaknesses: whereas a specific goal at the individual level tends to lead to better task performance, a shared goal seemed to promote support within the family. Similarly, whereas individual spaces seemed to encourage more personal reflections, the shared space attracted more non-task related visits to the portal by family members.