CS 247B: Design for Behavior Change
Team 15: Mindful MovementsRui Ying
Before taking CS 247B, I was wondering what was behavior change and how to change behaviors: is there a theory or is there a research focus inside HCI? What do you mean when you say “design” for behavior change? I thought the design was just for a subset of apps that people use to form a habit and nothing much else. After a quarter of studying by doing, I have an updated understanding of this topic.
First off, I want to talk about the class itself. I absolutely love the little activities we did with teammates and classmates, among which ethical discussions with classmates that were not from the same team were my best. I got to hear interesting stories from fellow students and be prepared to express my own opinions. For an introvert like me, they were wonderful opportunities to get out of my comfort zone and get deeper learning of the materials while knowing someone new.
One thing I dislike about the class is its organization. For many times, I felt like doing the same thing over and over again but in a different fashion, which is usually a good thing for learning. However, the differences and nuances between these practices were not clear to me, amplifying the feeling of repetition. The order of practices was also confusing: for example, we were asked to come up with onboarding process sketches after having done all sketches for the design.
To my surprise, my team did so well in this class, as far as I’m concerned. We delegated work and were able to distribute parts so quickly that everyone started working on their part as soon as possible. I never worried about covering for others, because all members finished what they were asked to in time, and as a bigger surprise, with fantastic quality of work.
However, not everything went as smoothly. At the beginning of our design process, I had a few different ideas with another teammate. We debated for several minutes without any tension but there was no vain in reaching an agreement. I really appreciated it that the teammate took a step back and offered compromises, when I also realized I should not insist on my ideas without listening to what others had offered. No hard feelings and we were able to move faster the next time we had any disagreement in a discussion.
About the class project, we chose Mindful Movements as our topic and developed Momentum, a smart reminder app that tailors to users’ schedules. There were many ethical concerns we’ve considered while designing, from the learnings of the ethical readings and discussions we had in class. One thing about a reminder system is it can be annoying at times. What we did to mitigate the manipulative side of nudging was to use users’ own motivations against themselves. Showing users their custom motivations as affirmations at the time they designate greatly reduces the chance of reminders being too dumb or too intrusive. Is this considered manipulations on the future self from your old self? I think not.
Besides, we also considered the inclusivity of the app. During the literature review, we discovered that some elites love to brag about their mindfulness practices. They see mindfulness as an elite hobby. We purposely avoided that by providing all kinds of options that accommodate people of different backgrounds/occupations and different physical capabilities. Every user can find value in our app by having flexibility in user preferences and customization.
Looking back now, I did learn a lot. Apparently behavior change is no simple topic. There are various theories behind it and while they may sound intuitive and natural to normal people, there are so many considerations such as manipulative nudging and gamification that it’s no easy task to design an app for behavior change in a practical and ethical way. Oftentimes the abstract design of the behavior change process is more important than the actual visual “design” itself.
Overall, great vibe and fantastic team working experience. If there were next time, I would want to focus more on the design principles and learn more about examples, especially industrial practices, instead of basic design techniques.
