I took Design for Behavior Change because I am interested in what motivates people to stay engaged with wildly successful applications such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. I wanted to explore if there are any mechanics that are used in these applications that can be translated into the domain of education. The driving force behind my curiosity is that platforms like Coursera and Udemy have extremely low user retention. There is only a small percentage of users that complete courses. I wanted to find ways to increase levels of motivation for users to stay engaged on platforms that are used in platforms like to learn new skills.
This class gave me greater insight into what drives human behavior in both the digital and non-digital worlds. There is a long list of helpful behavior related concepts we covered:
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- BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model
- Injunctive versus descriptive norms
- Anchors
- Reciprocity
- Scarcity
- Authority
- Choice architecture (Opt out vs default)
- Social conformity
- Anticipation is core motivator
- Refine target audience
- The rider, elephant, and path
- Mental and physical effort
I now have a large repertoire of concepts that I can further explore to increase user engagement with applications that focus on learning. I look forward to integrating some of these concepts into my capstone project for my masters degree program.
Apart from learning concepts about how to instigate behavior change, another important aspect of this class was discussing the ethical considerations of their use, and potential unintended consequences that design choices may have. As we integrate behavior change techniques into applications, I have a greater sense of how the design decisions we make will affect people of different backgrounds in diverse ways. The discussions we had in class prompted me to thoroughly consider the potential effects both positive and negative design choices may produce. I feel better equipped to imagine unintended misuse or harms of design choices, and more importantly, I have gained skills to come up with solutions to mitigate or eliminate potential issues that may arise.
The third big aspect of this class was applying the knowledge we have learned by designing and developing a mid-fi prototype of an application that intends to alter a person’s behavior. The application our team developed is called Screen Paws. The purpose of Screen Paws is to help people be more mindful as they use their devices so that they do not overuse applications. Through diary studies we found that people do not inherently find TikTok, Instagram or other highly addictive applications as negative. People use these applications to connect with friends, keep up with the news, or have some relaxation time. However, what we did learn is that people did not like it when they spent too much time on these applications without even realizing it. So, Screen Paws was developed to help users notice when they have been in an application for too long. If a user is in an application over the allotted time they would like to spend within that application, their cat appears on the screen and begins to eat. The cat gets fatter and fatter covering more and more of the screen as they further exceed the time limit the user had set for themselves. The cat is a cute, gentle reminder for the user to make them more mindful about the amount of time they have spent within the application.
After diary studies, interviews, data collection and analysis, literature reviews, ideation, prototyping, usability testing, iterations, and more, we arrived at our current solution. All the exercises we did to find a problem space and potential solution gave us greater insight into what the problem is and how it could be mitigated. Our team worked well together to synthesize our findings and produce a final product.
After taking this class, I have:
- Gained greater insight into what drives human behavior
- Learned to consider the unintended consequences of design choices
- Improved product development skills
It was a great class! Props to the teaching team, our Screen Paws team, and the other teams who also designed fantastic applications!
