Abstract
During the last decades, researchers and professionals have been investigating the key components of a successful marriage and proposing marriage principles to help couples with their relationships. Despite the abundance of marriage theories and training sessions oriented to turning theory into practice, people often fail to adhere to such principles due to increasing economic, social, and political pressures and consequent stress.
The Marriage Machine project of 2014 aimed to motivate and persuade couples to open themselves up to techniques of daily practice and interaction with their partners, with the objective of making their relationships with each other deeper, more enjoyable, more personally enriching, and educational. Through a user-centered design process, we planned, researched, analyzed, designed, implemented (in the form of sample screens), evaluated, documented, and prepared training documents for a mobile phone application conceptual prototype. The Marriage Machine combines marriage theory with information design/visualization and persuasion design. The project targets North American young adults, i.e., likely early adaptors of mobile device technologies. However, the potential user community includes much of the population of most countries who are in committed partner relationships, regardless of age, education, culture, religion, gender, or other demographics.
This chapter explains the development of the Marriage Machine’s user-experience design, which involves user-interface design, information design, information visualization, and persuasion design.
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Acknowledgements
For the Marriage Machine, the author acknowledges the primary assistance of Mr. Kia Hwee Chew, Ms. Vivian Lemes, and Mr. Kenneth So, AM+A Designer/Analyst.
In addition, the author thanks Prof. Bob Steiner, University of California/Berkeley Extension, International Diploma Program, and his graduate students (Aditi Arora, Fernando Bittar, and Caroline Verghote) for their assistance in carrying out market research, including surveys and interviews.
The author acknowledges the following publication (Marcus 2015) based on the AM+A white paper, on which this chapter is based:
Marcus, Aaron (2015). “The Marriage Machine” Proceedings, Design, User Experience, and Usability, 2–7 August 2015, Los Angeles, in Marcus, Aaron, Editor, User Experience Design for Diverse Interaction Platforms and Environments, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 8519, 2015, in press. Springer, London.
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Marcus, A. (2015). The Marriage Machine: Combining Information Design/Visualization with Persuasion Design to Change Behavior and to Improve Couples’ Relationships. In: Mobile Persuasion Design. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4324-6_11
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