Before taking this class, I thought that behavior change had to do with mental fortitude more than anything else. But after reading through papers, participating in discussions, and seeing others’ projects in the course, I realize that changing a given behavior is hard. It’s a problem that many people seek to tackle, but very hard to come up with a solution to.
What I Loved
I loved the emphasis on sketching and using post-its in this class. Something about just sketching out ideas and designs on paper made me feel more engaged with what I was making. Similarly, sketchnoting also was enjoyable–I also made sure to do my sketches on paper as well, and I feel like the ideas stuck.
The team-matching process also worked well. Originally, I had just wanted to team up with the people I knew, but I’m glad that I was matched with some new people because it also allowed me to make some new friends and connections along the way.
I also loved the overall topic for this class. Behavior change is an interesting topic that was also broad enough for us to brainstorm an idea that excited us.
What Didn’t Work As Well
The overall process of coming up with an idea for the app/solution felt rushed. We spent a few weeks doing the baseline study and the intervention study, but it felt like we were expected to go along with an idea for an app very quickly.
I feel like because there was also not a lot of class time to directly work with your team, when we were first forming ideas about what the app should look like, some of our team members were on different pages or had different visions. It would be great to have more class time to directly work with our teams–I think sometimes we were given too much time to sit at a new table with non-team members to discuss things, because sometimes those conversations weren’t as productive depending on which table we sat at.
The Project
I really liked the final product that we came up with in this class. The problem space was interesting and something that I cared a lot about. The final Figma that came out of the class was one of the best interfaces that I’ve ever worked on, so that was great. I think that this would be an app that I would personally want on my phone. It was also the first design that I had that played around with widgets, so that was really cool.
One thing that is still unresolved is our assumption that people will not get tired of logging their habits regularly on the app. This was an assumption that we couldn’t really test during the quarter given the short timeframe in which we had to conduct the tests.
Ethical Considerations
I think we could’ve done a bit more on our app to respect users’ privacies. On our app, we allow the user to add their friends based on their contacts and also the friends that are already on the app. The friends’ emails are displayed to the user, but maybe using usernames instead allows for more privacy. A user can also see their friends’ profiles, including their skin type, but perhaps we should consider a feature in which a user chooses not to show this information on their profile to others.
