cute film of 4/5 of our team – team 1!! <3
Introduction
Before this class, the idea of “behavior change” was really foreign to me as a whole – I knew it would be inherently challenging to change others’ behavior (especially at an impactful scale), but didn’t realize what steps or cognitive processes would be involved. I also didn’t know how this would intersect with design – with my only previous design experience thus far being CS147, I was apprehensive and worried about whether I would do well and just had no idea what to expect overall. Also, CS147 also felt like a constant race for deadlines, so it felt like I was trying to survive each weekly milestone rather than learning more about design holistically. Last Summer, I was able to do HCI research for 10 weeks, where I focused on user testing and running user studies of our mobile app – this allowed me to see the intricacies of working with users, the importance of feedback, and the importance of user-facing work. However, I felt like I didn’t have much say or control over the actual design process of the app, and was only expected to focus on getting tangible usability testing results after the app had already been developed – I wanted to see a holistic picture of the whole process.
To me, CS247B felt like it struck the best of both sides. I was able to engage in every step of the design process by working closely with the TAs and Christina without the rush, but instead with thorough coverage as each lecture delved deeply into what was to be expected through milestones. The steps of reaching our Hi-Fi prototype felt extremely natural and not disjointed (which is what design projects often feel like, especially in a 10-week class). Each project of 247B felt intentional and purposeful, island it never felt like busy work. I think the lectures accompanying each milestone topic (i.e. the whole session on branding, prior to mood board assignment) were extremely helpful in seeing the big picture.
The experience:
I have thoughts on the two distinct parts of this class, individual work and team-based work.
Regarding individual work, my favorite ones that immediately stand out to me are sketch notes and the life-logging activity. Sketchnotes, after having done through this class, feel so intuitive and essential in synthesizing information and making it memorable – but for some reason, I was never introduced to them in any other class or have thought of doing them on my own. As someone who also has very scattered thoughts and gets bursts of ideas from all over the place, sketchnotes allowed me the creative liberties to express my ideas and synthesize concepts in a nonlinear fashion, which was especially useful for a design class like this one. I intend to definitely use sketchnotes again, when I have to synthesize a large chunk of information that I want to retain, or organize my thoughts on a broad topic.
Another assignment that I really enjoyed was the life-logging activity from the beginning of the quarter. Despite it being so simple and intuitive to carry out (just..log what you’re doing every 15 minutes throughout the day) it was also equally challenging and unintuitive – I hadn’t realized how much time I spent in passing, not doing much with my day and literally doing nothing (i.e. staring into space). Forcing myself to log what I was doing also made me want to be more productive, which in hindsight feels like a superficial motivation since I wanted my life to be portrayed in a certain way on paper, but it offered me the outlet to be more intentional with how I spent my time and why I was doing what I was choosing to do. It was refreshing, and was a great introduction to the class, as it allowed me to be mindful of my everyday behaviors and realize what I wanted to change and patterns I wanted to pick up. Also, a weirdly jarring element I noticed was how natural this life-logging activity felt — a lot of the feedback from my classmates during our discussions after this activity were that forcing yourself to log what you were doing every 15 minutes felt like overkill and unnatural, but to me, I was often on my phone or laptop through consecutively long periods of time, so it did not feel all that unintuitive. This made me realize how long I go spending on electronics every day, and my general lack of focus throughout many parts of the day as it made me ponder: would this activity have felt more unnatural, if I was more focused on each my task, since it would have forced me to break that zone and log my behavior? An interesting redesign of this assignment would be giving the students the flexibility to choose the interval they wanted to log their days in, since I think this would give insight as to how long they spend on each task and how focused they are. It would also be telling of people break down their days, since I assume they would be inclined to log their day after a “chunk” is over.
As for team work, my absolute favorite activity that stands out to me is creating our team’s mood board and style tile. It was this activity I think, where everyone on the team was able to bring in something completely new to the table and work together to create on cohesive(?) brand personality. I really enjoyed getting to brand our app according to my aesthetic preferences (colorful, fun, vibrant, energetic) but also really enjoyed getting to see my teammates’ moodboards to ultimately come up with a final one. The steps taken from cohesively combining our mood boards into one, to translating it to a stye tile and implementing that style framework into our prototype was really meaningful and felt intentional. It was also super fun working with physical magazines!
Ethics
An ethical consideration that our team grappled with was privacy (week 4). The premise of our app requires our users to share their screen time preferences with not only our app but with a TikTok monitor of their choice as well. We settled on this design solution because from our personal experiences, we realized that having accountability partners were extremely beneficial for behavior change – for instance, I recalled from Summer that it was significantly easier to start going to the gym every day when I had a gym friend that would always go with me.
However, we realize that due to the nature of our app needing screentime / monitoring screen time behaviors of our user on their phones, this could feel intrusive, especially given that they are asked to share with another person who will constantly be notified. We also recognize that this could lead to an misuse of this feature, and came up potential scenarios such as: abusive partners trying to use this to control their partners’ phone usage. To investigate this, we interviewed our intervention study participants about how they felt about the intervention, and asked broad, qualitative questions about how they would feel about a friend monitoring their TikTok usage. The vast majority of our participants said having a trusted friend keep their usage in check would be beneficial, since the iPhone screentime limit features that many of our users already used are too easy to exit out of (i.e. clicking “ignore”). We also received an overwhelming sentiment that sharing TikTok screentime goals with one other trusted friend did not feel too privacy-invasive. However, we recognize that this is subjective, and want to work towards addressing this issue further through design alterations and shifts in implementations.
Next steps?
After taking this class, my design skills are definitely more polished and practiced, but also intentional and meaningful. I have genuinely had so much fun in this class and learned so much from the teaching team as well as from my teammates. From the discussions on ethics, to sketchnotes, to journey mapping and sticky-noting, my design approaches have become so much more strategic, well-planned, inclusive, and open-minded. In future design classes/contexts, I am confident I can bring in these meaningful discussions to continue fostering a safe, inclusive, and innovative design space.
Thank you so much to the wonderful teaching team for leading this class so incredibly!
-Yubin Jee
