Framing as an App-Design Measure to Nudge Users Toward Infection Disclosure in Contact-Tracing Applications

Contact-tracing applications are only effective in countering current and future pandemics when A) they are widely adopted, and B) users voluntarily disclose their infection to warn others. While much research has investigated how contact-tracing applications should be designed and promoted to motivate app-adoption, little is known about how to increase voluntary infection disclosures. To increase the voluntary infection disclosure among app-users, our joint research project with the core development team of a contact-tracing application, relied on the theory of message framing to investigate how to nudge users toward infection disclosure in contact-tracing applications. Based on a mixed method research design consisting of 15 workshops with the core development team of the contact-tracing application and a conjoint study among 139 users of a European contact-tracing application we show that message framing can be a useful approach to increase the voluntary infection disclosure in contact-tracing applications.