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. 2023 Nov 16;18(11):e0292390. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0292390

Table 3. Suggestion of BCS features.

No. Themes Behavior Change Strategy App Feature/ Aspect of Design
1. Instilling Self-Awareness • Provide information about behavioral health links.
• Provide information on consequences.
• Provide feedback on performance
• Daily/weekly/monthly summaries of performance
• Health tips or articles on the dangers or benefits of consuming too much or too little of certain foods.
2. Closed Online Group Support • Provide information about others’ approval
• Provide opportunities for social comparison
• Leaderboard
• Forums
• Link to share the diet app with friends.
3. Shaping Knowledge • Provide instruction • Recipes and articles on how to prepare healthy meals.
• Health tips on how to incorporate more of certain food into one’s diet.
4. Personalization • Prompt specific goal setting
• Set graded tasks
• Prompt practice
• Provide suggestions for goals and tasks which users may choose (e.g., A range of weight that users may safely lose or gain in one month).
• Suggest new goals based on users’ progress (e.g., milestones and badges)
• Allowing users to enable or disable reminders, notifications, and certain features (i.e., Privacy settings, mental health reminders).
5. User-Friendly Design *This theme does not correlate with any BCS in particular but is still an important aspect of design to engage with diet app users. • Simple but attractive colorway.
• Clear illustrations (e.g., Graphs and diagrams) which are easy to understand.