Introduction
My team focused on a project to reduce aimless scrolling through the creation of a bot building service called SpamMe. My personal reflection on my learnings and the changes in my perspective are described below.
Over the past quarter my perspective on behavior change and digital design has shifted significantly. Coming into this class I knew that I was interested in designing products that helped people improve their wellbeing, but I had not truly engaged in the space. Leaving the class, I have a new set of tools and experiences that will influence my future work. The class changed my own behaviors, seeded new ethical considerations, and taught me new design methods.
Changed My Behavior
At the start of the course, I was working on a project aimed at helping motivate people to change their behaviors through monetary incentives. This class helped me discover that there are better approaches than monetary incentives. I was especially inspired by the idea of how using or changing one’s environment can impact behavior. Using tiny habits also stuck with me. I have started making my personal goals as small as possible so that I can build momentum towards accomplishing a larger goal.
The measure me project and running multiple longitudinal studies about social media scrolling has made me more aware of my own phone use. I consistently notice myself following similar behavior cycles as the people that we studied. I will catch myself trying to fill blocks of boredom, or scrolling to procrastinate. My heightened awareness has seemed to reduce my aimless scrolling on social media. Instead of social media I often find myself reading the news. This change in my own life has reinforced the idea that you can’t get rid of a habit without having something else to replace it.
Ethical Considerations
Throughout the course I constantly found myself thinking “Is it okay for me to influence people this way with my product?”. Simple ideas like building an app to help people exercise more started bringing up internal questions around when and if it is okay to project my personal value system on others. I began seeing how many of the projects I was designing were pushing my own belief system on other people. I believe it is okay to embed my own set of values in the projects that I design if it is transparent, and if the user has the choice to opt-in. Discussions and readings emphasized how important it is to look for the blind spots created by my personal life experiences. This came up a lot in the project as we wanted to provide healthy substitutes to scrolling. Prior to this course I would not have thought twice about what a healthy alternative to scrolling would be. During the project I remember realizing that my set of “healthy” alternatives was biased towards what I believe is healthy.
During the design of our concept, we spent a long time trying to work out how to balance universality and personalization. A large portion of our concept involves going through a wizard to set up a bot. To reduce the cognitive load of making decisions, we created a step where the user selects interests from a list. This list propagates our bias through the options that we offer. This bias will impact how effective the app is since it dictates what content is posted. To combat this and create a more personalized experience we offered a free response area for inputting goals specific to the individual. In this case the personalization adds complexity to the design as well as increases cognitive load from having to fill in free text options. Prior to this project I rarely considered the downsides of personalization when done in a way that supported the target user. I thought that a product that worked really well for its target users was better than a product that could sort of work for everyone. I still believe products should be focused, but also see how important it is to consider extreme users and think through how a product might serve more than just a target persona.
New Design Methods
I learned new methods that I have already started to apply elsewhere in my design work. Assumption mapping and creating small tests for the most critical assumptions is applicable for many situations. I recently used the technique with my senior capstone team to converge on what to test. It quickly got the team to align on what we wanted to do next. I also used parts of what I learned from the “need finding for disruptive innovation” reading to host a design sprint for my team. I appreciate how transferable the techniques we learned are.
The close tie between what we were learning, and my previous industry experience made this class feel very real. Discussions around agile, scrum and other industry practices combined with previously working with some of the tools solidified the learning for me. Many classes I have taken are purely academic, but I felt like the things we learned in this class had a clear tie to the real working world. The connection between theory, methods, and industry made it easy to see connections for how to use my learnings from class on other design projects.
Inspired to Try Again
I feel like I have just scratched the surface of learning how to create products that can help people change behavior. In my next project I would like focus on encouraging a behavior rather than creating something to help people reduce a behavior. Since our team focused on reducing a scrolling, I didn’t have a chance to explore design ideas that enhances or encouraged new behaviors. After seeing all of the other team’s projects, I realized how wide the design space is when working to increase a behavior.
