Islamic Lifestyle Applications: Meeting the Spiritual Needs of Modern Muslims

TL;DR

This study evaluates popular Islamic lifestyle apps, revealing their shortcomings in supporting Muslim users' spiritual needs, and proposes design improvements to enhance motivation, social connection, and personalized religious guidance.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive assessment of current Islamic apps using motivation theory and offers design recommendations to better support Muslim users' spiritual practices.

Findings

Most apps lack features for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Existing apps do not fully support social connections and scholar interactions.

Design implications include guided information, community features, and personalized reminders.

Abstract

We evaluated contemporary Islamic lifestyle applications supporting religious practices and motivation among Muslims. We reviewed 11 popular applications using self-determination theory and the technology-as-experience framework to assess their support for motivation and affective needs. Most applications lack features that foster autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We also interviewed ten devoted Muslim application users to gain insights into their experiences and unmet needs. Our findings indicate that existing applications fall short in providing comprehensive learning, social connections, and scholar consultations. We propose design implications based on our results, including guided religious information, shareability, virtual community engagement, scholarly question-answering, and personalized reminders. We aim to inform the design of Islamic lifestyle applications that better facilitate ritual practices, benefitting application designers and Muslim communities. Our research provides valuable insights into the untapped potential for lifestyle applications to act as religious companions supporting Muslims' spiritual journey.