Experiential accounts of personal informatics are important as they inform us about users’ lived experiences with tracking technologies. However, these accounts describe experience at a meta-level and are not specifically related to how personal informatics is often composed of a collection of interconnected artefacts—what we call an ecology. To design personal informatics artefacts, we need a thorough understanding of how they are experienced as ecologies in practice. To this end, we interviewed 12 users of these ecologies using an interpretative phenomenological analysis approach. Our results show that users experience these ecologies through four aspects: effort minimising, sustainable tracking, performance explainability, and disconnection. We conceptualised these aspects as an automation experience—where technologies work collectively to minimise user effort while maximising insight. This conceptualisation provides a novel lens for analysis that can inform the design of more integrated and user-centered personal informatics ecologies.

We present a conceptual framework grounded in both users' reviews and HCI theories, residing between practices and theories as a form of intermediate-level knowledge in interaction design. Previous research has examined different forms of intermediary knowledge such as conceptual structures, strong concepts, and bridging concepts. Within HCI, these forms are generic and rise either from theories or particular instances. In this work, we created and evaluated a conceptual framework for a specific domain (instructional fitness apps). We first extracted the particular instances using users' online reviews and conceptualised them as an expectations and experiences framework. Second, within the framework, we evaluated the artefact related constructs using Norman's design principles. Third, we evaluated beyond the artefact related constructs using distributed cognition theory. We present an analysis of such intermediate-level knowledge with the aim of informing future designs.