I was really looking forward to this class at the start of the quarter because I was both excited to use my design skills and also learn more about how to change user behavior. Before this class most of my experience was from CS147 as well as multiple product management internships. As an aspiring PM, I knew that I wanted to continue to refine my skills and learn from Christina as much as I could about how to take an idea through the steps of brainstorming to designing and building. I also wanted to specifically learn more about how to change behavior after taking a behavioral science class last year. I know from personal experience that changing behavior is hard. Earlier this year, I set out to make my bed every single day for a month because that was the rule that I had always known: 30 days to build a habit. I ended up being consistent in making my bed for most days after but when finals came around, I stopped. It showed me that prioritization and reward are a huge part of changing a behavior.
Work/Experiences
I really enjoyed going through each step of the design process and appreciated that the reasoning behind everything we did was explained in class. It was invaluable to understand and see in our project the impact that each step had. I was very intrigued at the start of this class to understand how we were going to choose a behavior that was small enough to tackle yet had great impact. I really enjoyed the 15-minute exercise we did the first week of class. Some of the insights I drew from that activity still influence how I choose to accomplish some of my daily tasks today. I also loved creating sketchnotes throughout the quarter. I realized for me this is a very effective way to learn new material and even started creating ones to study for quizzes in one of my other class (see below).
My favorite activities in the class were persona-building and the intervention study as they both helped my team define the users we are building for and what are the most important tasks for our users. I’ve seen the power of personas in industry before, so I was excited to build our own. Building our personas, Grateful Grace and Nervous Nick, allowed us to better understand the needs, goals and pain points of our users. It brought our idea to life in a way and also created unity within our team as we would talk about features in our app in terms of these personas for the rest of the quarter. I also loved our intervention study because it provided invaluable feedback and reinforced that our idea was good and would be used. I mostly ran the study by myself as I was the moderator texting compliments back and forth. It was the most fun study I have ever run as seeing the compliments that friends were giving each other made my day. After analyzing the results, we were able to identify patterns and trends and understand the context behind the behavior of giving compliments. In the past (i.e. 147), I never discovered big insights from studies because they seemed rushed and didn’t have a specific purpose, so I was really happy that the studies in this class didn’t feel like that at all. My favorite class throughout the quarter was definitely the class about colors. My new goal is to now create a company in which people all around the world can identify the product based on a single color.
One part of the class that I didn’t love was mapping. Although it did help form some insights, I feel like we wasted a lot of time and paper (my team used well over 200 sticky notes during the quarter). I wish that maybe we instead focused on one or two mappings instead of trying to fit 5-6 in one class or maybe each team was in charge of one type of mapping and had to present to the class.
One interesting impact of my project was I found myself giving deeper compliments throughout the quarter. Because we were studying this behavior change, I understood the power that one compliment can have, and I ended up being nicer to my friends overall. I am curious if this behavior will continue after the class.
I would love to continue working with my team and on this project just for fun because I do think that there are not enough apps spreading positivity. There are some unresolved questions about the app design. We based a lot of our features on BeReal which is a very successful app, but I wonder if people will get tired or run out of compliments to give. This makes me think that maybe we need to expand the circle to friends of friends and beyond. There are also unresolved questions about anonymity that lead into ethical considerations.
Ethical considerations
I think that our project takes some ethical considerations into account, but after the project fair it’s clear there are some we need to continue to emphasize and work on. Specifically, concerns surrounding anonymity. Some users expressed a concern about bullying and hate messages. While users can block people on our app, maybe we need to make it more clear and set community standards and guidelines about what is acceptable. Maybe we should take the Fizz route and find a way for people to moderate each other.
We also need to make sure that we secure our compliments and ensure that our database cannot be breached. I could imagine users not being happy if they send an anonymous compliment that is revealed months or years later.
One ethical consideration that influenced our project was the universal design discussion. Our app is primarily in english, but as we were designing, we realized that it may be important to give users a different way to send compliments. We added in image and audio features to accommodate those that may have an audio or visual impairment.
Now I think..
I have definitely changed the way that I think about how to design and evaluate a product. I now understand that there are many ways to “accidentally” manipulate or influence users into changing their behavior. I also have a stronger appreciation for the brand and context of a product. I always knew that behavior change was hard, but after this class, I realize it’s NOT impossible. I also really appreciated the emphasis Christina put on the idea that one design process is not universal and that there are many different ways to accomplish similar needfinding studies and specific design screens. I now believe that anyone has the power to be a designer.
Next time, when faced with a similar situation I will…
Next time when I study a behavior change, I will first understand the core problem or reason that people do the behavior. I would not change my team or my project idea because I am really proud of our final product. I also will know next time how to easily resolve small team conflicts. It was really helpful to learn from Christina and the TAs about the simple yet effective ways of encouraging a teammate and accomplishing tasks as a unit. On a more fun note, I am excited to keep in touch with my teammates and we are all actively participating in user testing of one of my teammates’ apps that is in beta right now. We are using many of the skills that we have learned in this class to generate the most helpful feedback. This class has been one of my favorites in the HCI coterm and I am so appreciative of all the work that the TAs and Christina put into the class. I hope to stay in touch and walk Nina with friends in the spring!
