Final Reflection
Before taking this class, I thought behavior design was more focused on designing an app that focuses on changing one’s behavior. Meaning a person would need to change themselves for the app to work for them not the app changing itself for the user. However, after taking this class I now know that the focus is way more on the users than the app. I did not know there was this amount of testing with users before taking this course. I thought people just jumped into creating the app and then test it with users after. I now realized that is a bad approach and it makes so much more sense to test things out with intervention, assumption, and behavior testing. I never knew all of this testing occurred when creating an app.
I loved creating the style tiles and mood boards. I have never done that before and I really liked when we learned about those in class. I realized I love design and I love putting different colors together to see if they work well together. So this was definitely my favorite part during the entire quarter was creating the mood boards and style tiles. I also really enjoyed the mood board aspect because we got to cut things out of a magazine to create a design for our app. This was definitely my favorite class because I was able to be creative and design how I imagined our app to look like. I necessarily didn’t hate anything in this class but something that I disliked was the baseline study where we had to write all of those post-it notes and find common themes between them. I didn’t hate this but it was very time consuming and we had to put them in different categories and then put them on a matrix chart. I just felt like the whole process was iterative and time consuming. It was definitely needed because it allowed us to get some really good insights from our participants but it was very time consuming I felt.
Tools and methods I would use again are definitely the moo board and style tiles. I mentioned them in the previous paragraph but I am mentioning them again because I really enjoyed creating them. I would also do the intervention study again because I felt that this was very insightful when it came to what direction we should take our app. No tools or methods did not feel right. Everything really made sense and every aspect helped us create our final product. I felt like if we did not do one method then our app would not have turned out the way it was.
For ethical consideration my project used nudging and manipulation in our project. The mechanism we used to showcase this was using friends to remind them to put on sunscreen if they notice their friend’s plant is dying. The plant was also a nudge because if they do not log that they put on sunscreen then their plant will die. These are acceptable nudges because it is encouraging our users to put on sunscreen and to log it so their plant does not die. I would also consider this a healthy nudge because it allows users to want to take care of their plant. I do think that there are users for whom the mechanism might be manipulative. A user can potentially create an obsession to always making their plant healthy and might create an unhealthy dependency to their plant. Meaning they might become so obsessed they’re always on the app to ensure their plant stays healthy. I do not think this would occur with most of our users but I can see it occuring with some users. This demonstrates manipulation because we are essentially saying if you do not log your sunscreen your plant will die. This logic definitely does show manipulation that a user must put on sunscreen to keep their plant alive.
Now I think that testing with participants before creating an app is so important. I have a lot of app ideas and after taking this class I want to do a lot of assumption testing to see what works best with users. I think testing allows us to understand our users better and see what their needs are and how our app can help them with their goals. During our testing we also interviewed a lot of people which was another thing I would have never thought to do before taking this class. I gain so many different insights from interviewing with our participants and they were so open about what they don’t like about sunscreen and ways they might be encouraged to put on more sunscreen. All of these insights were very helpful when it came to creating the final prototype. I never realized that all of these studies, testing and interviews had such a huge impact on the final prototype.
Next time when faced with a similar situation I will definitely lean on interviewing participants and spending a lot of time on the baseline study, I think this would allow me to gain a lot of important insights on what I need to do to make the app the best it can be. I truly always thought that the app design comes first and then coding comes right after. I love how we spent so much time actually interviewing people and doing intervention tests, behavior tests and assumption testing just to name a few of the tests. I love how we spent more time on doing that than actually designing the app. Overall, I am so happy I took this class. I truly learned a lot about design and putting an application together. Its so much more than just figma design and coding. It has a lot to do with testing with users before even getting to that part. Even though we were testing how to change a person’s behavior I think I can apply this to any app I plan on creating in the future.
