Before taking this class, I believed that trying to change someone’s behavior and influencing them to do so was a much simpler process in which you would just come up with an idea, design it, test it on a few people, and then code it into existence in the hopes that it would have the desired results. But as I’ve learned in this class, the procedure is a lot more intricate and subtle than I first thought.
Working on the Palendar app with my team was very eye-opening. I loved how we started the project by identifying a problem and conducting thorough need-finding research. This allowed us to better understand the issues our target audience faced and create a solution that catered to their specific needs. The approach of combining research, personas, journey maps, and iterative design was very effective in helping us create a meaningful and user-centered solution. In the future, I’ll apply these techniques without a doubt.
Yet, I believe that occasionally we may have spent too much time on particular techniques, or we just simply explored too many of them, which caused some delays in our progress. Going forward, I will make every effort to strike a balance between thoroughness and efficiency. Additionally, I wish we had been able to test our app with a larger user base and gather more feedback to refine our solution. Our focus on graduating students might have limited the app’s potential audience, and it might be beneficial to expand its scope to other demographics. This would have provided us with more insights into the effectiveness of our app and areas for improvement, but also I know doing this is almost impossible in a quarter system, and trying to find the right balance between incorporating all of our ideas and maintaining simplicity and usability in the app was definitely challenging.
One surprise I encountered was the extent to which users’ social anxieties and time constraints influenced their behavior. This insight led us to focus on making it easy for users to schedule hangouts with friends while reducing social pressure. Another aspect that was new to me was the importance of ethical considerations in the design process. I am usually focused on creating a visually appealing and functional app, but the class discussions and readings made me realize that our design choices could have unintended implications for users’ well-being, and privacy.
I wish we had spent more time incorporating ethical considerations into our design from the outset. While we made efforts to incorporate principles of inclusive design and design justice, I believe there are always issues that we haven’t considered. In terms of nudging and manipulation, our app uses availability matching and pre-composed messages to encourage users to schedule hangouts. While these features are designed to be helpful, they could potentially be seen as manipulative if misused or overused. For example, if we turn our model into an ad-driven business, we could be potentially nudging users to unwanted events or hangouts.
In terms of well-being, Palendar promotes social connection and personal growth, which are key components of well-being theories. However, the app could potentially contribute to users feeling overwhelmed by social commitments or experiencing FOMO.
Now that I have become more informed about designing an experiment for behavior change, the work on this project has helped me develop a more holistic understanding of the app design process, which I can apply to future startup ideas. I’m already in the process of running a pilot with a company, and I have re-designed some parts of the pilot around the lessons and principles we have learned in class. I’m conducting a pre-screening of individuals that I will be working with during the pilot to identify the right audience, and I’m creating forms for tracking how the daily behaviors are changing because of the intervention I have designed through my tool. I’m also preparing a post-interview scripts to make sure I receive good overall feedback about my idea.
Next time I will try to utilize more of the techniques we learned in class before coding anything. I believe there is a lot of value in drawing bubble maps and system path designs to know what are the important tasks the users want to achieve. This will help the engineering team to be more efficient in knowing what to build that could provide maximum satisfaction from the customer.
