Designing information systems to break habits and promote preventive behaviours during large-scale disease outbreaks

Adhering to preventive behaviours, like social distancing and wearing a mask, can help reduce the spread of some transmissible diseases; however, doing so can be a challenge as it requires people to break established habits. This challenge will be most evident for organisations as they need to ensure that all stakeholders adhere to preventive behaviours to resume in-person business operations. While various information systems (IS) have emerged to address this challenge, they remain limited in scope and fall short of helping users navigate the evolving practices and guidelines of a pandemic. To address this shortcoming, we adopt the design science research approach to derive design principles for IS supporting the breaking of established habits and promotion of preventive behaviours. The design principles are rigorously anchored in the habit alteration knowledge base and the Health Belief Model. We demonstrate how the design principles can be applied using an illustrative case.