Before this class, I thought designing for behavior change was easy because I reflected on how easily influenced I am. If something is framed in the right way, I usually respond to it, so I assumed behavior change design was mostly about making something persuasive or visually appealing. However, I was very wrong. This class made me realize that designing for behavior change is much more complicated because people are not just making choices in a vacuum. Their actions are shaped by time, stress, motivation, environment, habits, and even how much cognitive energy they have left in a day. I came into this class thinking the challenge was getting people to care. But really, I’m leaving this class thinking the real challenge is designing something that fits into people’s lives in a way that feels supportive, realistic, and respectful.
I did this work through our group project on helping busy university students eat more consistently. We started with a baseline study because we did not want to assume we already knew the problem. On the surface, eating seems simple. But in reality, students’ schedules were unpredictable, their lunch windows were often only ten to thirty minutes, and their definitions of “healthy eating” were very different from one another. That made me realize very quickly that there is no universal solution, even for a problem that initially sounds very universal.
One thing I really loved about this class was getting to know my group. We aligned on personality and interests, so working with likeminded people is always a plus. They were a great group of people to work with, and I felt like we were able to bounce ideas off each other in a productive and comfortable way. At the same time, this made me think about teamwork more broadly. In real life, you are not always going to work with people you naturally click with. One thing I took away from this class is that empathy and communication are essential when working on a team.
One thing that did not work as well for me was that some of the Canvas assignment instructions felt unclear at times. I sometimes found myself second guessing what exactly was being asked for or how detailed the deliverable needed to be.
What worked very well for me was the overall structure of the class. I liked how interactive lecture was. Hearing from guest speakers and then discussing the content with my group made the material feel much more hands-on and applicable, which made the class feel very grounded in practice.
There are also several tools and methods from this class that I know I’ll use again. I will definitely doodle more to help visualize my ideas! I didn’t realize how useful sketching could be for making abstract ideas feel more concrete. I also want to continue using roadmaps, personas, journey maps, and system models whenever I am developing some sort of product. Those methods helped me establish a clearer vision for what we were building and why. One surprise for me was how much simply tracking behavior could influence behavior. During our study, participants said that having to log their meals made them more aware and motivated. Some even described it as feeling gamified. Ultimately, that was surprising because our baseline study was not even meant to be an intervention, yet it still shaped behavior.
One specific problem we encountered during the final project was that our design risked overwhelming the user. Because we wanted to support meal planning, reminders, and consistency, the interface started to carry a lot of information and options. Through usability testing, we heard that some parts of the app could feel cluttered or overly demanding. We did make changes, but I still feel like this issue is not fully resolved. If I had more time, I would want to simplify the UI and make it more direct and accessible. I think even minor design changes could have a big impact, like expanding the calendar view, reducing visual clutter, and making the core actions more obvious. This project made me reflect on how much UI and UX affect whether I engage with a digital platform at all. Even a good idea can fail if the user experience feels draining.
This project also raised ethical questions for me. Our design used reminders, planning tools, and light tracking to encourage more consistent eating. I think these are acceptable nudges because they support a goal that users already have rather than forcing a goal onto them. Still, I can also imagine how these mechanisms could become manipulative if they became too guilt-driven, too frequent, or too prescriptive. Privacy is also really important here. Eating habits can be personal, and our design should protect users by collecting only what is necessary and making people feel in control of their own information. We also had to think carefully about inclusivity. Since students have very different goals, schedules, and relationships to food, the right balance is not complete universality or excessive personalization. We wanted enough flexibility for users to feel seen without making the app overly complicated.
This project connects a lot to my other work at Stanford because I’m very interested in human-centered design and how technology fits into real people’s lives. Across different classes and projects, I keep coming back to the same question of how to build tools that are not just functional, but actually user well-being centered and realistic.
Now, I think designing for behavior change is not about controlling people, but rather it’s about understanding them. The next time I’m faced with a similar situation, I will spend even more time narrowing the problem, simplifying the interface, and making sure the intervention fits naturally into the user’s actual routine. Ten years from now, I think I will remember what it felt like to be a student at Stanford building an app from just a few prompts and ideas. I think that is pretty cool, and it says a lot about how quickly technology is developing. Even though AI is not perfect, it is still wild that our team and every other team in this class was able to create a functioning prototype, research a problem, and test a solution all within ten weeks!
