Before taking this class, I thought that we would be introducing small changes that would be unknowingly impactful to people, such as helping them drink more water, measure their carbon footprint, or maintain a workout plan. I’m not sure why I thought it would be limited to these kinds of generic, everyday behavior that we would just assume people want to improve; after all, people have so many “bad” habits that impact their livelihoods, whether they be social, financial, or related to some other aspect of a person’s life that we may not immediately think of. One thing I learned from the class is that we should be trying to change a behavior that the target individual perceives as one that is negatively impacting their life, and this is likely not to be something we can immediately guess as outsiders.
I felt that the approach we followed in our project was very logical, as almost every step led naturally to the next. The writeups at each milestone putting our process and reasoning together really helped with seeing and appreciating that logical progression. There were a couple of exceptions that I didn’t think fit all that well in the process, such as the story map that confused us and didn’t really inform our next steps as much as I would have liked, but as a whole I appreciated that the assignments fit together like puzzle pieces rather than being disjointed the way they might be in other classes.
Some of the tools I think I’ll use again in the future are diagrams like the connection circle and Fogg behavior model, platforms for quickly organizing many ideas like Miro, and of course prototyping tools like Figma and its plugins. On the other hand, I would want to avoid using WordPress to share my future work with others since it’s quite tedious to individually upload, insert, and format media on the platform, and I don’t really wish to make my work available to the public anyway. As a more private person who doesn’t even use social media, I prefer to have something I’m working on accessible only to those who need to see it.
As for skills, the entire process we went through for our project in class has definitely become part of my skillset (I was already directly applying what I was learning in class to another team project this quarter for which I needed to guide my team members who had no background in HCI in identifying a problem and then designing, testing, and presenting a solution), but one in particular that will always stay with me is quickly drawing storyboards. It has so many applications, whether it be for a product I will be implementing in the future or for a music video I’m planning with my a cappella group.
For my team’s project in particular, I think something we left unresolved is the app’s resemblance to a regular shopping app; I think there was even a cart in the top right the last time I saw the home screen in Figma. There are various ways to justify this look, one being that the user could satisfy their desire to be shopping in an app without actually doing so by opening ours, but I had been hoping for our app to give off a feeling more removed from that of shopping—something more grounded, rational, and steady. This is just a personal preference, of course, and something we would need to test with potential users, but I worry that we may have veered toward encouraging more shopping rather than snapping the user out of those indulgent reveries. Perhaps we added too much when just a browser extension would have sufficed for this idea?
To change behavior, our app uses little reminders to open mindful shopping prompts. These reminders appear when the user is about to add an article of clothing to their cart. I imagine it to be like a Honey popup that grabs the user’s attention but is easily dismissible. The timing is meant to slightly disrupt the mindless flow of adding items to an online shopping cart by reminding the user to think more on the consequences of their purchase before they make it. Sure, the user has the option of merely swiping the reminder off the screen or skipping the prompt and exiting at any time if they don’t wish to go through the mindful shopping prompt, but it still appears, which may be annoying but also somewhat necessary for people who easily overconsume on online shopping sites. I think the ease with which the reminder could be dismissed makes it an acceptable nudge while still getting the user to think mindfully, whether they dismiss it or not.
As we explored in our design fiction, however, the app encourages a static closet—making do with what you have and not purchasing more. Someone who wants to revamp their style, whose body is changing, or who owns old and worn-out clothes may not appreciate the perceived hindrance or shame of being asked whether they really need an item if they plan on buying a nontrivial number of new clothing items at once. Simply seeing and dismissing a reminder may not make them feel manipulated into sticking with their current closet, but the app itself logs recent shopping activity and expenses, praising avoided purchases and in turn framing purchases more negatively. With the theme of the app being encouragement to refrain from purchasing new clothes, a user may feel manipulated into abandoning their desire to find new clothes that they feel will suit them better. Perhaps we could help with these situations by making the app more accepting of wardrobe evolutions through more economical means such as thrifting or clothing swaps? It may be a difficult balance, though, to encourage healthy wardrobe changes while discouraging excessive shopping for new clothing.
Now that the class has ended, I know that behavior is something pretty difficult to get a grasp on just by talking to people about their experiences and routines. Behavior is more of an action that people take whether they realize it or not, and it needs to be studied by observing actions. I had never done a diary study before (or any longitudinal study, for that matter), but I’ve come to better understand and appreciate how well it can help us identify what’s really going through people’s minds and obtain convincing quantitative data to use when creating a solution. The next time I find myself working on a project with a similar structure to the one we followed in this class, I’ll consider multi-day observational studies like this and make sure that every step of the process motivates the next, just like in this class.
