Before this class, I did not consider how so many parts of our daily lives are or have the potential to be influenced by ideas of behavior change. I perhaps thought of behavior change only in terms of big decisions and large life transitions; for example, quitting smoking or becoming vegetarian. I might have also thought of behavior change as a single and simple point in time, like a switch being flipped, with no process involved.
I loved the journey of seeing an idea go from a concept to a prototype, from abstract to concrete designs. Even so, I remember it being difficult to come up with and choose a specific behavior to target in the beginning, as it felt like there were many reasons both for and against every idea we had. I also enjoyed partially incorporating sketching into my routine again with sketchnotes, even though it was conflicting at times for my “perfectionist” self to come up with a sketchnote I was ready to turn in.
There were many tools that I might use again, especially ones that have practical applications. For example, I found the style guide very helpful when we were actually creating our prototype to have a unified theme and foundation, and the mood board helped us develop the style guide. Personas were also helpful to bring our target audience alive, although as we might have discussed, there are also additional considerations in the future with “stress cases” that we should value. The system path also helped us find a happy path through our prototype, which allowed us to concretely determine the necessary screens and interactions. The methods we used helped us make some decision or discover some insight that ultimately helped inform our prototype.
My work on the project relates to other work in Human-Computer Interaction classes as they explore the relationship between humans and technology, but perhaps in slightly different ways. This project focused specifically on behavior change and solving a problem in a very specific area; ultimately many of the projects that I work on aim to help people’s lives in some way. In terms of other classes outside of HCI, however, this project is different because it allowed me to gain practical experience with ideating and designing a prototype, compared to work of maybe memorizing information or learning concepts.
In ten years from now, I will probably forget all the details of what went into this project, but I might remember general emotions and the process of coming to a final prototype. I might also remember actions I had to take, especially those that notably occupied my thoughts, like finding people to recruit for studies.
Our project (RiseRight) uses social interaction and elements of gamification to change behavior. These might be more acceptable nudges because a genuine escape clause exists, where people could just delete or stop using the app if they do not want to be influenced by these factors; users are still able to decide for themselves whether they want to buy into these tactics for change. Our nudges could potentially become manipulative for people who take gamification and competition with others extremely seriously, but even then, the streak and leaderboard is based on a behavior you can only do once a day (e.g. waking up on time).
We originally were thinking about displaying wake-up times in addition to streak lengths, but ended up getting rid of this feature to help protect users’ privacy. We only let people see information for people who have accepted their friend requests. The app only collects data that is required for its functionality, and we ask for permission to import contacts from the user. Thus, we avoid aggregation of small bits of data by focusing on only a specific type of data that we need. Additionally, we avoid secondary use of data by only using data for its “primary” purpose that is directly related to the app’s function.
In terms of interface design and design justice, our current app uses variations of names from the Stanford family, including Leland, Jane, and Leland Jr. since a team member included them in some mockups for the initial leaderboard screen, and they just stuck since then. Leland could be a gender neutral name, but the Stanford last name could potentially suggest a Euro-centric view. For our design process, we tried to create gender-neutral personas, but they do not consider edge or “stress” cases very well. While we want to be accommodating and welcoming to all people and the “universal user,” it is hard to balance this with specificity, and better accommodating different people is certainly an area to work on in the future. Additionally, there are difficult questions to consider around whether a “universal user” truly exists because every person is different and one design will most likely not be the best for everyone. Ultimately, we focused on a specific subset of users that made up our target audience given our time and resource constraints.
Now, I think of behavior change as a much larger spectrum of both small and large behaviors to change, each with various methods to induce change and ethical considerations to keep in mind. There is so much that goes into behavior change and the design process, and scaffolding with different tools and activities helps, even when the different activities can feel disconnected at first.
Next time, when faced with a similar situation, I will have had some experience and ideas from the last ten weeks to build on. I have gained more exposure to the many methods and tools that can help, in addition to beginning to think about difficult but necessary questions around different ethical considerations.
post-its and drawings made many appearances in my camera roll this quarter (:
