Making Systems Inconvenient to Stimulate Motivation of Competent Users

This paper evaluates user motivation when they use two applications for unlocking mobile phones. One is a convenient application that adapts to users and the other is an inconvenient application that does not adapt to users but only gives feedback to help them adapt to the system. Our hypothesis is that inconvenience gives users space to develop their skills for using a system. This space props up the motivation of users while adaptive systems often reduce the space for such skill improvements by discouraging motivation. The experimental results show that the competence of users correlates with motivation when they use the inconvenient system, there is no correlation when using the convenient system. The results imply that inconvenience, which provides users space for skill improvement, stimulates the motivation of users under the condition of user competence.