Before this class, I knew I loved human-computer interaction because of the way technology is so deeply intertwined with the human experience, but I had never taken a class that fully dove into how we could use it to change the way people behaved. I was intrigued – in the past, I’ve done a lot of work with sustainability, and most of the battle lay in making living a sustainable lifestyle easy and accessible. I also was intrigued by the fact that behavior change isn’t necessarily a good thing, and was hoping to learn about how design has negatively impacted people and caused them to behave in undesirable ways, so that I could learn to be a stronger and more ethical designer.
One thing I really loved about this class was the real-world examples we dove into (especially the Costco examples, since I love going to Costco). It made me critically examine what I’m influenced by, such as when I was checking out at Sephora and I was forced to wait in a line surrounded by mini make-up products that were very easy to grab and go. As I was looking around considering the products, I realized I was falling into behavior that some consultant in Sephora probably thought of and pitched, just like we had learned about.
As for tools and methods that we employed in this class, I think I would use both the diary study and intervention study again, but perhaps in a different manner. One thing I wished we did in our research was watch one of our participants’ online shop, and have them talk it through with us. I also thought the usability testing from our peers was super helpful, as they brought up flaws with our app that my group probably wouldn’t have considered since we came in with a lot of pre-existing knowledge. One caveat is that these were all experienced design students who were thinking about their own app designs; maybe next time it would be worthwhile to do usability testing on random people.
An aspect of the project that is still un-resolved to me that I think would be interesting to explore is how we can actually embed Mirror into online websites/other shopping apps – we just assumed in our prototype that it would be possible, but the reality might be more difficult. I would’ve also liked to build out a flow for when people are shopping on a web browser or their laptop, since I personally rarely shop on apps or my phone.
I’ve been really interested in sustainable fashion as well for a long time, and it led me to think about how in the future, we could have Mirror incorporate some of those principles. For instance, somebody might want to shop less or choose to shop more sustainably, so the mindful shopping prompts could center around whether or not they’re making sustainable choices. This could tie into my general idea of being able to set goals on Mirror.
As for ethical considerations, I think one concern we saw after doing our design fiction was with user privacy. Mirror would theoretically be collecting data about purchase history/financial information and image data about outfits. I think we would have to be very ethical about our implementation so that this information cannot be used by shopping retailers to encourage people to shop more. I also think there’s a huge spectrum of online shopping and we possibly could’ve gotten very different personas if we talked to different demographics, both gender, race, and socioeconomic wise. While our personas did a good job in straddling socioeconomic statuses, I definitely think we could in the future cast our net wider.
One way my thinking has evolved has to do with the research methods we employed in class (the diary study and intervention study). When designing studies, I hadn’t thought of the burden it has on the participant before. When I had to log my day every 15 minutes at the start of the quarter, it really opened my eyes to it. Our team worked to trim our studies to be as easy on the participant as possible, and next time, when I’m faced with a similar situation, I would like to be just as considerate to my study participants as I am to the users of my app design.
