Before this class, I thought that behavior change was only done with gamification, social pressure, and negative pressures. I thought that behavior change was only for big changes, but I’ve learned that things like habit change or other small changes also count as behavior change. I also thought that the design process only had a few ways of finding and iterating (interviews, storyboards, testing prototypes).
In this class we tested and learned a lot about synthesis techniques and the trade-offs between different synthesis techniques. I think I will be taking away the difference between wireframes & sketchy-sketches, as well as some of the synthesis techniques. While some of the techniques we covered had a lot of overlap, the more general principles of synthesis are ways I will take away. I thought that I got better at interviewing participants for running prototypes, and thought that my team came together well on executing and synthesizing the results quickly. This was a change from the sharp learning curve of an experience that my group and I had in CS147.
I’m also shocked by how the idea of sunscreen has progressed. The sunscreen idea was my idea when I was running late to class at the very beginning of the quarter and was rushing to rub sunscreen on before I left my room. At every stage, the idea has gotten really good traction and I’m very happy that this was an idea that my group also wanted to do. I’m glad that we took on a small habit rather than something like relationships with food. Because it is a pretty neutral habit, I thought that we could be more creative and out of the book with creating feedback loops. We found that creating social pressure in the virtual world is hard. It is even harder if you want to create social pressures by design that are ethically good, while trying to consider the implications of these social pressures down the road.
Thinking more about nudges & manipulation, I don’t know if my group fully thought about how we are using manipulation. We used a plant to depict a person, and the health of the plant reflects your sunscreen habits. This is used as a nudge for the user by creating an emotional connection and then pulling on these emotional strings to make the user feel bad when the plant is not healthy and doing well. This is taken to an extreme with the depiction of the plan being on fire. We thought that this plant was a more acceptable character than an animal or human-like emoji. It assumes that people feel less empathy for plants, but more empathy for a plant when it can show emotion. However, this could be considered unethical to some degree. It could be manipulative to be using emotion to get a user to do something. We are impacting their well-being if we are creating stress and worry, or even making them feel bad and ridiculed by their peers. While this makes up a large part of how we are creating accountability, it is still a question in terms of ethics that I grapple with.
Thinking about design for wellbeing is also interesting. While the behavior of putting sunscreen on constantly is a good thing for one’s skin health and wellbeing, the way in which we are nudging the user to do so could be bad for one’s well being. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, we are causing distress to the user in order to get them to change something. Is a preventative measure (skin cancer in the future, or even just visible skin aging) something that is more important that real-time, current stress that we are putting the user in. This is something I’m not sure we have gotten answers to. It is possible that the stress of having to keep up with friends and this app creates a more tumultuous experience and ends in the opposite of positive well-being.
I hope to take away these ethical considerations for the next time I build a project. It feels like we are pushed to develop and break things fast so that we can improve and get to the next version of a (hopefully) better prototype. However, I think I need to think more mindfully about the potential downstream effects when considering different ideas.
Overall, I am super grateful for my team and the entire teaching team for creating the space to learn, make mistakes, and develop new skills!
