This class has been a great learning journey for me. Before this class, I did not consider how little changes in design could have such large impacts on people’s behavior. I had learned about some of this in previous classes and had considered them when doing my own designs, but I did not realize the extent to which we could control people’s behaviors even with the most minimal design change. It almost feels like a superpower to be doing this. I loved how this class gave us so much space to be creative and let us explore so many different design venues that allowed us to reach new heights as designers. I especially enjoyed storyboarding and drawing a variety of stick figures and faces cause it really helped me get creative with the stories I made for our posture solution. Something I did not like about the class though was the quantity of information that was thrown at us in such a short period of time. There are several data visualization techniques that I have already forgotten about and would need a refresher on if I were to take another class.
Overall, I did like the design of the class. It was a little fast-paced, but I think that there was a lot to cover and the teaching team was trying to do the best they could with the time they had. I would have liked for the class to maybe try to focus on less content so that we could spend more time fleshing out our ideas though. Our team felt rushed to pick a topic and pick a solution to the point that we did not feel that proud of our work in the end. There was a lot more we would have liked to do for our solution, but we were so limited by the course schedule that we could not do more. Nevertheless, we had a great time brainstorming during class and I was pleasantly surprised to see how much information and user insights we could gather from pre-study and post-study interviews. I had never done both before and I feel like I learned so much from the people I interviewed and that conducted the study, something I would not have been able to understand without conducting both interviews. There was so much change between both interviews that it helped gather the best insights for our solution. If I had more time to work on the project, I would definitely want to conduct more thorough user research. I would have liked to have actual target users test our prototype and see if our assumptions were correct. I feel like I am missing the part in the project when I learn if my project worked or not. This was something I was expecting to do in the class and was surprised to learn that we did not have to go that far.
From a more ethical perspective, I feel like our project manipulated people into having good posture more than nudging them. The concept of taking five dollars from each user and using it in a prize pool which they could only earn back their money from if they met their goals was definitely a form of manipulation. We are taking advantage of the fact that people are loss averse and would rather not lose money if possible. As for user privacy, one could argue that we invade their privacy by having them use a posture detector that is constantly giving us their physical data. We use that data to later determine if they reached their posture goals. This is health information that people might consider to be a little invasive, but it is hard for us to accomplish our posture behavior change if we don’t collect this information. In addition, our app also collects billing information which some users might be uncomfortable with, especially when they no longer want to take part of our app.
After this course, I realized how important it is to be mindful in the way we present information to users and how I should sit back and reflect on how the design I choose to make now may have negative impacts in the future. In addition, I need to make sure that I can tell a compelling story that will differentiate my products from my competitors. If I am faced with a similar situation in the future where I have to design something that will change people’s behaviors, then I will do a more thorough competitor analysis and do a lot more user research and usability testing. I want to make my product as successful as it can be when changing people’s behaviors.
