  Recent years have seen a surge in applications and technologies aimed at
motivating users to achieve personal goals and improve their wellbeing.
However, these often fail to promote long-term behaviour change, and sometimes
even backfire. We consider how self-determination theory (SDT), a metatheory of
human motivation and wellbeing, can help explain why such technologies fail,
and how they may better help users internalise the motivation behind their
goals and make enduring changes in their behaviour. In this work, we
systematically reviewed 15 papers in the ACM Digital Library that apply SDT to
the design of behaviour change technologies (BCTs). We identified 50
suggestions for design features in BCTs, grounded in SDT, that researchers have
applied to enhance user motivation. However, we find that SDT is often
leveraged to optimise engagement with the technology itself rather than with
the targeted behaviour change per se. When interpreted through the lens of SDT,
the implication is that BCTs may fail to cultivate sustained changes in
behaviour, as users' motivation depends on their enjoyment of the intervention,
which may wane over time. An underexplored opportunity remains for designers to
leverage SDT to support users to internalise the ultimate goals and value of
certain behaviour changes, enhancing their motivation to sustain these changes
in the long term.
