I mentioned in my application for this class that one of the reasons that I wanted to be on the HCI track was because I was interested in taking this class. A large part of it was a personal fascination – I have downloaded god-knows how many apps to try to change countless behaviors. They always entice me but almost never work. I wanted to take to class to better understand how to make these apps and understand the principles of behavior change to maybe utilize them in my own life. Before this class, I didn’t know about all of the small, different factors that play into behavior change. I also never really thought about how these technologies and companies can be so manipulating without the user even knowing to get them to change their behavior. I also definitely didn’t realize the amount of unethical manipulation that companies are using to get users to do what they want. This class has truly been an eye opening learning experience for me – and I love how I can directly see applications of the material in my own life.
I loved that we got to brainstorm our own ideas and work on our project throughout the quarter as we learned certain topics. I didn’t necessarily hate this, but I wasn’t the biggest fan of how early on we had to choose a habit that we wanted to work with. I understand that this is a fast-paced class and not focused on the needfinding component, but I think it would have been cool to spend more time at this stage and learn about what are the biggest struggles with habits certain populations have. The work on the project relates a lot to my work in other HCI classes like CS 278 and CS 247B – I remember doing a lot of very similar assignments and work in these classes, but I haven’t worked on anything specifically related to behavior change and the ethics around it, which I thought was super interesting and cool. 10 years from now, I highly doubt I’m going to remember doing a project on trying to help people fix their posture, but there have been some things that I learned about behavior change that I feel like will stay with me. I’ve thought a lot about topics like anchoring and habit stacking. Because these ideas are so relevant to to my life and I can use them consistently to make changes to my behavior, I think they’ll stay with me for a while. If we got to redesign our project, I think I’d try to make it a little less complicated. I think a lot about how the only thing we could find was a $70 dollar tracker to make this objective and work long-term, but this doesn’t feel like a sustainable choice in that we wouldn’t have very many users (which is an issue on a social app). I know this was the best solution we had for now, but I think it’d be cool to design something physical that can even be a better tracker that we can integrate with our app. Overall, I really did love our app and I’m happy we were able to apply so many course concepts but I think there is definitely room for improvement and iteration, which, given time, I would love to do!
From an ethical perspective, we definitely used nudges to change behavior. We collect money from our users (that we give back if they do well) in an attempt to use loss aversion. We let friends work together towards a common goal for social proof and social influence – if you don’t meet your goal, you let your friends down and you all can’t get the collective reward. Nudges like these aren’t meant to be manipulative, since we don’t pocket any of the money and overall we want the goal to still be that everyone wants everyone else to succeed. This definitely can become manipulative, especially if everyone starts trying to get their friends to lose so they can make more money. We tried to do the smallest amount of money that people would still care about without making it so anyone can win too much money if everyone else fails, but this likely needs some assumption testing. Anything where you pool money can end badly, so maybe we need to approach this from a different angle. We try to respect user privacy by collecting data that is very limited and using a device that collects only the information that is necessary to improve the posture. Furthermore, that data is only shared with their groupmates that they approve. However, if there is a data leak or the scope of this app expands to use more features that needs to track more things, this can lead to serious issues with user privacy. We can avoid this development by maintaining this core value of protecting user privacy and making sure that we are only ever collecting data that is necessary for our features (that our users would want).
I mentioned this above, but I really now do think about the things we’ve learned in this class in the context of making my own decisions and setting up my own habits. Things like knowing that we’re loss averse, rewards should be variable but everything else needs to be constant to change a behavior, as well as . I’ve also been thinking a lot about where the blame lies when technologies get used for malicious purposes (whether it was designed for that intention or not). One thing that I haven’t stopped thinking about since we had this discussion in class was how nicotine patches were sold with cartoons and cool designs to get more smokers to buy them, but this also led children to buy them as well. The designer never intended for that – they technically only wanted to decrease the amount of smoking. This was an unintended consequence but who does the blame rest on? I frequently think about the debate my group had that day; it was really refreshing to hear multiple perspectives. This isn’t to say my thinking has evolved to be one side of the debate or another – I don’t know the answer to this question and maybe it doesn’t have an answer. But this is yet another thought that I’ve been having since I took this class which I hadn’t considered before. If I ever do decide to become a startup founder as is the hallmark of a Stanford CS student, I think I’d try an app that influences behavior change ethically – I would use all of the things I’ve learned from this class but spend a lot more time needfinding and iterating. I just wanted to end by saying the biggest thank you possible to Melody, Amy, and Christina for teaching so much in such little time and doing it in such a fun and memorable way. This class is one of the best that I’ve taken here and I won’t forget what I’ve learned for a while.
