Prior to the course, I’d never considered deeply the factors that influence behavior change or the implications of attempting to change someone’s behavior and the intention behind it. I was initially drawn to the topic because I was interested in addiction, and how techniques for behavior change might help us combat addictions. Yet, I’d never paid much attention to what works for me in behavior change and how I myself formed the habits that I have today.
For instance, the tiny habits reading really helped me place my own nudges in the context of using an action or context as an anchor to remind myself to complete a certain behavior. I realized that many of my successful attempts at behavior change followed the model that the reading described. For example, I always check to see if I have my keys before I unlock the door. Or, if I’m traveling with a large number of bags—whenever I move from one place to another, I’ll count the number of bags that I have as I pick them up to make sure that I haven’t forgotten any.
Overall, I loved the ethics discussion in the class, especially how they sparked industry anecdotes from Christina. I felt like having that as a weekly recurring activity helped us consistently think about the ethical implications in our user testing and prototyping design decisions throughout the course. Although part of me would have loved seeing a bit more specificity in some of the discussion prompts (ie given a certain situation, what should we do and what are the implications), I also enjoyed talking about overarching ideas and more abstract concerns like the erosion of one’s self-perception of their values and agency as they continue to attempt change within the system.
In terms of tools that felt like a right fit, I really enjoyed the system map exercise that we did before sketchy screens because it quickly helped us highlight the key points of interaction a user would have with our app.
The biggest thing that I wish went differently for this class—although I totally understand that this might not be feasible given the scope of the course—is that we were encouraged and given the tools/skills to design interactions that weren’t just visual and app-based. It would have been really cool to try to learn how to design for other types of interactions (voice-based and touch-based), both in terms of accessibility and for the sake of allowing our learnings from 247B to differ from 147. For example, we were initially interested in the idea of a smart mug that would directly remind the user to bring it and give indications of refills, but I personally felt ill-equipped to be able to design a prototype that would properly demonstrate those interactions. In general, there is just a lack of prototyping tools for haptic feedback or voice-based interactions, so I do understand why this was not a part of the class. Still—it would be really cool if it were, since I feel like many behavior changes are physical!
I think the biggest risk that users might face in our app is the location-data collection that we use in order to track whether our user is leaving home or at a coffee shop so that we can give contextualized reminders to use their reusable mug and auto-fill out the location on their drink log. Because our app features a social system of “communities” of people challenging each other to meet a cup-saving goal, we worried that public groups might endanger users who do not want certain people (like an abusive ex, or a creepy neighbor) to see what coffee shops they’ve been going to. We decided to mitigate this by (1) allowing the option to form private communities, so that your activities cannot be seen by those who haven’t been invited to the community, (2) block a user, although this wasn’t one of our key task flows, and (3) posting privately so that the drink log is visible only to the user. The user’s username and first + last name also do not have to be their real name, in case they wish to preserve anonymity.
We also wanted to make sure that we were nudging people to bring their reusable containers—not to drink more coffee and spend more money on specific partner coffee shops. Thus, we allowed users to set goals for bringing their reusable mug based on the percentage of cups (out of a total number of drinks they expect to buy per week) rather than based on the number of cups.
The next time I design for behavior change, I will be sure to keep in mind the frameworks and tools that we were taught in this class. They have been really helpful for navigating the complicated factors that go into shaping human behavior, and, especially in terms of ethical considerations, it’s made me a lot more in starting conversations and asking the right questions. Huge thank you to the teaching team for creating such a supportive and kind learning environment. I am really grateful to have gotten to work with such an amazing team of lovely people who always bring positive energy to our meetings. Go Team 2!!
