Before this class, I was very skeptical. Human behavior seems pretty hard to change because everyone has their own habits/behaviors that they are used to. I think back to when Slack overhauled their UI layout and people went feral because it made navigating Slack very different. People like what they are used to so how are you going to change behavior? I didn’t realize that a lot of behavior change is hacking at someone’s already established habit system. If you learn about how their current habits survive and thrive, you can squeeze in new habits or set off a chain of new behaviors.
Learning Context
To first understand why someone’s habits thrive, you need to understand the context in which they happen. The baseline study was important in understanding the triggers, the response, duration/frequency, locations, emotions, etc. surrounding the habit. I learned how to ask the right questions in order to have a holistic understanding of why skin-picking occurred for different people. I was pretty nervous entering a Reddit community for skin-picking and asking sensitive questions regarding something so personal. Fortunately, our participants were motivated to share their stories and our anonymity ensured a safe space. Most of our participants shared that they were much more aware of the context of their habits after our baseline study, which is a good step forward in their journey to address their habit. However, I wish we were more transparent with our participants about what we took away from their experience. In other words, I wish we shared with them their own data and our observations/summary of their data. It would’ve made for an interesting follow-up discussion and we could have validated our assumptions.
Intervening
I think our team came up with a really smart and practical idea: to utilize the Shortcut app on iPhone in order to intervene a user’s habits. The Shortcut app is powerful because it utilizes data that the phone collects in order to trigger notifications. For example, it’ll recognize that you’ve tried to open a certain app or connect to CarPlay or at a certain location to trigger a notification. It’s not just setting a time and date for a reminder. CarPlay could be helpful for one participant who told us how they always skin-pick in the car when they are idle and the most anxious. We wanted to use this existing tool to show people how they can create their own interventions specifically for body-focused repetitive behaviors. However, it became harder than we thought to integrate another application like Shortcuts. I was frustrated to learn that after learning the instructions for Shortcuts, they updated the app and had a completely different UI!! They also dropped a feature that I put in the instructions. This is the danger of having app dependencies because software is being updated regularly and you don’t know when everything will change. If we were to redesign, we would have to make sure that the instructions are general enough so that if the Shortcut app was updated, we wouldn’t have problems. Ideally, we could have users make shortcuts in our app without having to navigate the actual Shortcut app.
Ethics
In addition to the mechanics of the app, we had to deal with sensitive content. It doesn’t seem like people want to readily share about their skin-picking tendencies with other people, let alone with an app. In regards to privacy, I was proud that as a team we chose NOT to aggregate data that users share with us about their habits and determined that the data is local to the user. It would be too consequential to have an algorithm guess “wrong” and impose a skin-picking intervention that wouldn’t work on a user. This is why our app has a somewhat universal design where we allow users to create their own interventions using the shortcut framework. My only concern with creation is that it puts more work on the user to create the right intervention. It would be interesting to explore having community-sourced intervention ideas for BFRBs; we could compile shortcut examples/ideas from the community. I think having templates and inspiration is important in motivating users to create these interventions.
Moving Forward
How have my personal thoughts evolved? After learning that dopamine increases before the reward occurs, I can’t stop thinking about dopamine in my daily life. I’ll be waiting for my friend to come visit me and think, “oh here comes the dopamine.” I think about how dopamine drives my habits for so long. As said in one of our readings, it is grim to think about how humans are controlled by our reward systems. But it’s important to understand them for us to wean away the “bad” habits and create the “good” habits we want to see. Even if we feel stuck in what we are used to, some rewards are worth building good habits for like having fulfilling relationships, feeling confident, or having healthy skin.
Excerpt from Good Habits, Bad Habits: Rewards, Page 3
“It might sound dehumanizing to talk about in these terms, but it doesn’t have to be.”
