Coming into this class, I had a fair amount of design experience, but I had never designed something within the domain of behavior change. I really enjoyed getting to learn about the different ways in which we can try to encourage change in people. My favorite reading was the one about prompts and anchoring new behaviors to old behaviors. My favorite in-class discussion was about the elephant, rider, and path analogy. I wish this kind of content could have been more spread out throughout the class or at least referenced back to in later assignments.
I found the synthesis activities to be very insightful. I gained an appreciation for how looking at data in different organization patterns can help reveal takeaways that weren’t immediately apparent. I liked how the quick pace of the synthesization encouraged you to work at a high-level and prevented you from getting too stuck in your head. The different tools that we used in the synthesization process are certainly ones that I could see myself using in the future. By the end of the in-class activity, I felt like I had a thorough understanding of my group’s target audience, including their behaviors and needs, that proved useful as our project progressed.
One aspect of the project that surprised me was that the target audience could have conflicting needs. For example, we saw that some of our interviewees enjoyed spending time outside alone for reflection while others liked spending time outside to hangout with their friends. Creating a solution that focuses on one of these needs would neglect the other, yet creating a solution that targets both might be unfocused and lack depth. I would have liked it if there was more guidance on how to make tradeoff decisions like these. I also would have liked if there was advice on how to narrow down your target audience in a meaningful way. My group’s target audience was “busy college students” which often felt too vague to serve effectively.
A challenge that I encountered throughout the quarter was how quickly we were expected to learn and apply different tools that we learned in class. If you didn’t have a clear understanding of a certain tool by the end of class, you wouldn’t have much time to catch up because there would be an assignment due within the next few days that expected you to have used the tool and been able to reflect on it. What is the purpose of reflecting on something that you don’t know if you used correctly in the first place? Additionally, our team didn’t have much time to revisit previous work and make improvements because there were constantly new assignments. If we had gone back to iterate on old work, we would have quickly fallen behind. Overall, the class was unforgiving for people who didn’t get it right the first time, and it didn’t create space for teams to recover from mistakes. The switch to completion-based grading helped relieve some of the stress, but I don’t think it was effective at actually helping students learn the material which should be the goal.
Privacy was a big ethical concern for my group’s project. Given that our app was location-based and involved users sharing photos of their location throughout the day, we wanted to make sure that this information could not be abused by bad actors. A particular concern that we imagined was that you could use someone’s check-in photos to stalk them. To address this concern, we focused on using anonymity to protect our users’ information data. Users have anonymous usernames on the app, so when they share a photo to the public activity feed, it can’t be tracked back to their real identity. We also intentionally made our system more opaque, so users can only interact with others’ photos via stickers. This prevents other users from outing someone’s real identity in a comment section. A potential future concern could be related to the contents of the photos that people post. A user could accidentally share someone else’s location by showing them in the background of a photo. Moderation of the photos that people share to the public activity feed would be a high priority issue if we were to move forward with our project.
After taking this class, I think that designing for behavior change has many potential ethical pitfalls, but when done with thought and care, it also has the potential to do a lot of good in users’ lives. Going forward, I have a variety of new tools that I can apply to future projects I work on. In another class, I am working on a game that helps users improve their quality of sleep. I am excited to apply what we have learned throughout this class to create something ethical, inclusive, and beneficial to users.
