Problem Domain

We are aiming to tackle the problem of people not wearing sunscreen. Consistently wearing sunscreen can help prevent skin aging and skin cancer later on in life [source]. However, only about 30% of women and less than 15% of men regularly use sunscreen [source]. We are creating an intervention to get people to wear sunscreen on a regular basis because we believe that putting on sunscreen is a small but important step in a morning routine.

Baseline Study

We selected college students and new graduates in their early 20’s because we had the greatest number of connections for this audience. We also focused on this group because it’s important to develop sunscreen-wearing habits early,  since the process of protecting skin should be done over time.

We sent out an initial screener and got a total of 20 responses, of which there were 12 people who wore sunscreen regularly and 8 who sometimes or never wore sunscreen. We proceeded with 10 people for pre-study interviews: selecting 8 people who either sometimes or never wore sunscreen (opportunity to change behavior) and 2 people who always wore sunscreen to understand how they developed the habit. The two main pieces of information we were looking to extract were:

1. If you wear sunscreen, why do you choose to wear it?
2. If you don’t, what about it makes you not want to wear it?

Our baseline study lasted five days (Wednesday-Sunday). Each day, they  were emailed a Google Form with questions about whether or not they wore sunscreen that day and why.

A more detailed study plan along with the full interview script can be found here.

Synthesis

We synthesized our results using affinity mapping, 2×2 matrices, connection circles, and fishtail models.

Our baseline study showed a few common themes:

• Necessity: People felt like they only needed to wear sunscreen at the beach to prevent sunburn. If it’s cold or cloudy outside, they don’t feel the need for it.
• Aesthetic and comfort: People hated the greasy feel or white-pasty look on the face.
• Immediacy: People didn’t think that skin aging or skin cancer were problems they needed to worry about, and didn’t immediately see the effect of not wearing sunscreen.
• Time: People have minimal morning routines because they’re in a rush to get out the door.
• Social Pressure: People’s attitudes towards sunscreen were influenced by their peers.

Based on these insights, we wanted to investigate how we could make the impacts of not wearing sunscreen more immediate. We also wanted to investigate the social pressure aspect further and see if we could increase one’s exposure to more people who want to wear sunscreen and tie it to a habit. We hope that by doing so, we could help incorporate daily sunscreen-wearing as a habit.

See our original detailed synthesis process.

Comparative Research Analysis

To get a sense of what was already on the market, we analyzed sunscreen reminder apps, habit trackers, and skincare applications.

Our competitors all focused on tracking multiple habits instead of one, which we found overwhelming. In addition, apps like Sun Index, Sola, and Mii Skin required users to provide private data such as location, healthcare provider, or camera access, which added friction.

Strengths of the competitors include: inclusivity of different skin types, individualized data personalization, reminder notifications of habits, smart reminders based on UV index throughout the day, and a social aspect that allowed users to encourage each other’s habits.

2×2 Matrix

[In response to  4A feedback] From our 2×2 matrix, we see opportunity within the social/tailored to sunscreen category. There is an untapped opportunity to incorporate a social environment for users to build their sunscreen habits with their friends.  Our unique value proposition could be an app that helps you build the habit of applying sunscreen with friend(s).

 For more information on our 11 competitor analysis please view our comparative analysis blog post.

Literature Review

As we develop our product, we are keeping these insights in mind:

1. Sunscreen education has positive correlation with sunscreen use, but basic sun-induced skin hazard awareness is not enough. There is a need for more comprehensive education
2. Text messaging has efficacy in research to promote sunscreen use
3. Important factors to consider for starting a new routine behavior are: a desire to reduce effort, prior experience with similar behaviors, and beliefs about effective approaches.

Our full literature review can be found at the following blog post.

Personas and Journey Maps

Based on our baseline study, we came up with 3 primary personas with distinct needs and motivations (detailed versions in post linked below):

• The “Busy Bee” knows how important sunscreen is for skin health, but is often in a rush and forgets to wear sunscreen on the way out. They want a seamless way to introduce sunscreen into their busy schedule.
• The “Reluctant Rhino” knows that they should wear sunscreen, but they don’t see the importance of wearing sunscreen on a daily basis, especially because it’s hard to see an immediate effect. They are looking for a low-effort way to make sunscreen a habit.
• The “Working Walrus” knows that sunscreen is important, but they spend most of their time indoors working an office job. They want to be educated more on why they should wear sunscreen daily even with their low sun exposures.

Based on feedback, we updated our personas in the original blog post to take into account non-digital tools that users might have also with them.

Our corresponding journey maps (higher resolution) :

These insights helped us understand the best way to encourage them to wear sunscreen. Because all participants thought about putting on sunscreen during their morning routines, we ensured that our intervention starts in the morning. Our future steps involve tapping into a person’s morning routine and pushing the intervention there to get them to start using sunscreen.

For more information, view our detailed personas and journey maps in the original blog post.

Intervention Ideation

Since 5A, we have ideated new interventions based on new interviews and feedback we received from course staff.  We added these updates to the original blog post.

The key insights grounding our top three ideas were 1) making users more educated about sunscreen, 2) finding a way to incorporate sunscreen into busy schedules outside of the morning routine, and 3) using social pressure to promote sunscreen use.

Our top  three ideas were 1) Sensor attached to sunscreen cap +  Educational nudge, 2) Sunscreen dispenser by swiping Stanford ID card, 3) accountability group chat.

We decided to go with the accountability group chat. We wanted to target the user’s motivation to wear sunscreen, which was already lacking for both Working Walruses and Reluctant Rhinos. Busy Bees specifically would rather get to their activities on time rather than putting sunscreen on. Insights from our baseline study showed that people’s attitudes towards sunscreen were heavily influenced by those around them. We hope that by prompting users to put on sunscreen each morning in an accountability group chat, we can utilize social pressure to push users to prioritize sunscreen more.

Intervention Study (Details)

We conducted our intervention study by adding our 9 participants to small 3 person group chats. Each chat had 1 team member acting as the prompter, 1 team member acting as a participant, and 3 participants. Each morning, the prompter sent a text in the group chat prompting the participants to send a picture of their sunscreen.

Synthesis – Affinity Mapping

Frequency Grouping

Connection Circles

Fishtail Model

A key takeaway was that we should pivot away from text reminders and focus on fostering human connections. People liked seeing others wear sunscreen, and found human interaction more effective than plain reminders.  Participants tended to ignore the text reminders after the first few days, which meant that it would not be an effective medium for long-term behavior change. In contrast, people felt reminders that required some action to resolve would be more effective, as they would be harder to ignore.

In addition, there was a worrying drop off in engagement after the first couple days of the study, leading to a similar decrease in sunscreen usage. From our synthesis, we found that users were discouraged by less activity, leading them to want to participate less and exacerbating the issue. Moving forward, we will consider ways that  we could encourage sustained participation that doesn’t rely on uncontrollable factors like other peoples’ behavior.

Detailed information about our study plan can be found in this blog post.

Storyboards

Storyboard Insights:

While individuals are aware of the long term effects of not wearing sunscreen, it was not enough to actually establish the habit since the effects were so much farther down the road. It’s important to utilize short term awareness and to think more about the core motivations for habit building. We should present the effects in a more sped up way to elicit a more immediate behavior change. From this, we explored using a metaphor to amplify the “effects” and how we can leverage the emotions of the user within the metaphor.

Storyboard(s) 1:

Users are fearful of having skin cancer down the line after getting sunburned. They struggle with remembering to put on sunscreen when in a rush, but have a crisis moment when their doctor alerts them that they’re at risk of skin cancer. They become more diligent with sunscreen, and their friends and family help keep them accountable. This prevents them from skin cancer in the future and they can enjoy going outside again.

Storyboard 2:

The challenges of this scenario is that the person’s current sunscreen makes them break out, but buying new sunscreen costs a lot of money. The awakening moment is that the person is getting too tan so they are trying to get to an outcome where the sun no longer impacts them.

 

Storyboard 3:

The individual gets sunburned at the beach and knows they should wear sunscreen but struggles with finding a sunscreen that they like the consistency and feel of. However, they have a crisis when they start to see aging and melanoma. While there is no solution found yet in this storyboard, the end outcome is that they can enjoy time outside again because they are protected from the sun.

Storyboard 4 (updated based on feedback – metaphor, leveraging emotions, fast tracking the crisis moment, being more aware of the short term effects):

Individuals have a plant that they are invested in caring for. When they do not put on sunscreen, their plant gets burned and the health of the plant declines with each day. This immediate decline in the plant’s livelihood is a way we explored amplifying the crisis moment to be sooner.

Future Directions

From our intervention study, we learned that people liked the human aspect of the group chat (getting kudos, seeing other people also wanting to develop the habit). They also liked learning about other brands of sunscreen. Moving forward, we want to build on this increased sense of immediate urgency, build an emotional/social investment, and to focus less on an automated reminder. We want to explore using a metaphor to leverage the emotions of the user to amplify the immediate “effects” of not wearing sunscreen.

From the lack of widespread adoption of apps out there, literature surrounding text reminders, and our intervention study (people said they would not download an app), we decided we want to try incorporating low effort mediums, such as widgets, built-in interfaces, or browser add-ons.

Areas we are looking for feedback in

Feedback on our future directions would be greatly appreciated!