Before this class, I really didn’t give much thought to what went into services, applications, and products which I use on a daily basis to promote behavior change. Moreover, I wasn’t sure what this class would specifically cover. I assumed it was going to be more discussion and reading based with no project. Freshman year I took a class called Life 101: The Meaning of Life. In this class we learned techniques to center our conscious and subconscious minds such as meditation and journaling. More formally, we read literature to support the underlying phenomena of life-betterment techniques. In CS 247B, I was excited to be able to synthesize a product with an ethos grounded in design and behavior literature.
I have always been a visual learner which makes it difficult to draw conclusions from long scientific papers. This class was the first time I had ever heard of the concept of “sketchnoting” readings and I found it to be one of the most valuable learning techniques I have ever used. While I enjoyed the use of sketchnotes to synthesize learning from the papers we were required to read, I felt there was too much busy-work in the beginning of the class with no meaningful structure. Even once we were assigned to our groups, I felt that the work we were assigned each week was too broad and not deep enough. Every moment I felt I was making a leadway into a problem and solution, we were told to attempt a new form of brainstorming. It was difficult to see the trajectory for the project and the class as a whole.
My final project focused on promoting compliment giving. We grounded our product on the assumption that giving compliments improves the attitude of the giver and the receiver. This didn’t relate to any work I had done at Stanford prior to this, but the design process built off the tools I learned from CS 147. I took CS 147 remotely which made it impossible to employ some of the ideation and brainstorming tactics we learned. The information was still presented to us, but we weren’t able to practice using it. As such, being able to brainstorm with our groups in class on large sheets of paper and the whiteboard was invaluable to my skills as a designer. There were parts of the design process that I didn’t find useful, however. I felt that we weren’t given enough time to build and test more robust prototypes, and instead spent too much time testing ideas with behavior studies. One of the videos we were assigned to watch was about building landing pages. The video described how one way to test a potential solution is to build a simple landing page. If random people are willing to give you their name and email to hear more about your product, then the idea is worth pursuing. Instead of spending a week running assumption tests, and instead of the first two weeks of class not building anything, I feel that it would have been more useful to start immediately and simultaneously testing initial ideas.
Our product uses the same manipulation tactics as BeReal to prompt users to give compliments. From the baseline study we learned that without incentive, people might think of compliments they would give to someone, but they are not likely to actually deliver those compliments. Therefore, we made the decision to design our application in such a way that you can’t see the compliments you’ve received for the current day until you give a compliment. We felt that this was an acceptable nudge.
During the innovation and testing of our solution, we debated having a public compliment wall where you can see publicly posted compliments delivered to another person. However, during the testing and assumption testing phase, we learned that people felt most comfortable sending compliments privately. As such, we made it a point to respect the user’s privacy to the highest degree. In my own experience, I engage deeper with apps where I feel that my privacy is being protected.
The most drastic change to my thinking now after finishing CS 247B is the implications of design choices which I had previously thought were agnostic to breaches in ethics. The readings and discussions we participated in regarding nudging have completely adjusted my view on the design of applications I use everyday such as Snapchat, Instagram, iMessage, and even Outlook mail. Push notifications on iOS are small nudges we receive at all times of the day. From CS 247B, I have learned that designers are responsible for how an app influences a user’s life not just when the app is actively being used, but on all aspects of the user’s life outside of the app.
Next time when I am faced with a situation where I can incorporate a nudge into a design of mine, I will come to a conclusion keeping in mind my responsibilities to the user outside of their use of the app. Furthermore, I will analyze how a nudge can be beneficial – as in the case of my project – and how a nudge can become manipulative for a specific user, or a specific community of users.
Thank you Christina and all TA’s who have helped immensely this quarter!
