Final Reflection:
Before this class, I was unsure what “behavior change” really meant and how we, as designers, had any involvement in changing a users’ behavior. I thought that design was mostly a tool for making an app more aesthetic and appealing to see, but not that impactful for making change in an environment.
My experiences:
I did this project with only CS147 as a design background. I loved that this class was significantly smaller than CS147, and that there was a theme to go by for each of the 247-series. The weekly sketchnote assignments were also helpful for keeping me on track with learning, and I felt like those assignments, along with the Measuring Me assignments, really helped me to learn some new design concepts. I thought that the trajectory of the class worked really well for me in terms of the needfinding/setup of our problem statement in weeks 1-3, the user interviews and baseline studies/comparative research in weeks 4-5, prototypes, storyboards, and assumption testing in weeks 6-8, and visual design elements/moodboards and usability testing of our clickable prototypes in the final weeks of the quarter. The design process was familiar to me since I also went through a similar process in CS147, but I felt that this class went a little more in depth about design models we could use and enjoyed the ideation processes (with lots of post-its!) during class. In my opinion, a lot of the assignments turned out a little repetitive to me (such as the sketchy notes and wireflows) since I felt like there was personally no new insights I gained in the time between the two repeat assignments from my users, and therefore no new design I could yet create. I feel like it would be more useful to spread out the assignments into weekly (instead of per class), so we have more time to determine/focus in on the point of our app and how it helps our users.
One memorable problem we encountered in our design process was when we conducted our user testing, and it seemed like what we assumed to be a large problem for most college students, actually wasn’t that big of an issue. While the problem of TIkTok addiction still exists in most Gen Z, we determined that students weren’t addicted to the point that it was detrimental to their health or grades— it was mostly just used as a relaxer/destressor at the end of the day. Therefore, we didn’t really know what to do at this point. Our identified problem didn’t seem to exist, but we still had to carry out this problem in the numerous assignments loading up on our plate. To solve our problem, we eventually decided to pivot to a different user profile. Instead of targeting users seriously struggling with TikTok addiction, we targeted daily users of TikTok that are mindless in their act of opening/scrolling through the app. I wish that we had been given more time to narrow down our users and conduct more user interviews with people this problem seriously affected, but unfortunately, with the timeline of this class, there was not enough time to do so.
Ethical Considerations:
We tried to take into account all the ethical considerations of our app during the design process, but one major factor we recognize is that our app is currently only tested with Stanford students. We are aware that this is not a representative sample of all Gen Z TikTok users and that our user data might not be reliable in the sense of how addiction manifests for the general student population. Some of our hypotheses are that since Stanford students prioritize work and school, they might be better at closing their addiction to TikTok because of how busy they are. This is not to say that other college students are not busy, but it might just be that Stanford students are that much more stressed with their work. Additionally, we are trying to discourage TikTok usage by holding users accountable through a friend, but depending on who the friend is, this nudge could turn manipulative in the way the friend might misuse the app. Some hypotheses we came up with for this ethical consideration were that an abusive partner may refuse to let their significant other use TikTok unless they complete some sort of task for them—which was not our intention for creating this app.
Another ethical consideration we thought of, but have yet to implement, is the interface design of our app. Our current app does not have any voice-to-text transcription features, or any alternative text features for images for users with visual accessibility concerns. We kept these considerations in mind when coming up with the moodboard of our app (avoided blue text for color-blind users) and made our buttons/font size significantly larger for visually impaired users to more easily see. However, we plan to address additional accessibility features at a later iteration stage.
Conclusion:
After taking this class, I now believe that designers have the capabilities to change a users’ behavior through small nudges in the design of the app. It is important to know the user well enough to create a design that is suitable for them and will have a long-lasting effect, therefore next time when faced with a similar design project, I will prioritize defining the user, and spend more time conducting interviews to pinpoint the user’s pain points. That will make the design process much easier to carry out.
