I’ve heard a lot about this class and have been excited to take it for a while. Coming in, I had done some light reading on the formation of habits, but that was about the extent of my knowledge on behavior change and the theories associated with it.
This class is extremely thoughtful in how it guides you conceptually through its focus. It marries science, theory, and ethics with user experience design and implementation extraordinarily well. That being said, it is clear that the heart of this class is truly about changing behavior over the UI/UX HCI pieces. I really appreciated that, especially coming from CS 147, which I would argue strikes the opposite balance. In 147, the objective is heavily focused on the latter, and it is extremely rigorous in its approach, but it lacks the collective theory and domain depth that this 200 series brings out. So having built that foundation in 147, I really appreciated that this class shifts focus to a strong topical objective.
Now with this, there was still so much freedom to choose where and how to apply the behavior change focus. Our team chose to explore AI usage. We are living through a technological and behavioral revolution, and it is not always the case that we get to actively explore that in our classes at Stanford. In fact, I think there is largely a resistance to it, but I love that this class gave our team a chance to dive into something so relevant and personal to our experiences today.
Kevin, one of my team members, was super inspired by user experiences that bring animals or other figures into your line of vision. For example, Google Colab has a feature where creatures walk across the top of your screen as you code. Prior to Stanford, I had also used a tool that helps you focus by connecting that objective to a tree growing, with your attention acting as the mechanism for its wellbeing. As a result, delight became a central aspect of our prototype. I find it fascinating to see the way in which ethical considerations come into play when delight was an inherent principle in our prototype concept (a duck that walks around your screen when you are using AI). For example, this quarter we discussed the ideas of nudging and manipulation. Common examples range from subtle to very blatant. But what happens when the nudging is wrapped into a cute duck that is waddling across your screen? Do users perceive it as delightful or annoying? We had a range of reactions, from pure joy to confusion around its purpose.
Besides delight as a core design principle, our final prototype interface demonstrates a universal design principle. In fact, our intervention study helped us realize and further our commitment to that principle as we transitioned from a Chrome-specific browser extension, which only applies to a smaller subset of users, to a lightweight desktop experience which can be used by many more users and across all preferred AI tools without confinement. We were also deeply committed to privacy throughout, so everything is stored locally on the user’s desktop and no data is stored or viewed by us. We added a text affordance to communicate this to the user, and it was something that we also tested through our assumption tests.
This project has encouraged a deeper thoughtfulness regarding my own behavior and AI usage. It has been so eye-opening to explore these themes and topics with my team, our fellow classmates, and with the support of Butch and the teaching team. Behavior change looks very different in different contexts, but there are so many universal themes and learnings that I will take with me into my future academics and endeavors!
