Before this class I thought that making behavior change through design was too difficult to be done by small groups of people and that issues like doom scrolling were impossible to solve just through design. Now, I have learned that making behavior change through design is difficult no matter how large the group and that doom scrolling is an issue that actually can be mitigated through intentional design choices. Throughout the quarter, I found myself being able to look past the physical interfaces of apps and develop of sense for detecting when practices were being used that subtly manipulated people to think a certain way (Both positively and negatively). Additionally, before this class, I had a much more optimistic view on behavior change regarding companies, but now I find that many of the mainstream apps today use some form of design for behavior change to create some sort of behavior response from the users.
One surprising thing I experienced throughout the design process was that it wasn’t a gradual process that led us to our final design. Ultimately, the processes that led to our final design were moments of inspiration that came after compiling all of our data, and if our progress was graphed, it would look more like staircase than a linear graph. With that being said, I don’t see this as a negative thing and actually believe that this has taught me the various factors that build up to positive design and how all the different data collected can form a different big picture than initially expected. Something specific I loved during this process was figuring out how to balance user interference with straight annoyance. Because doom scrolling as an issue is a widespread yet underdeveloped area, it was cool to discuss with my group about how we can make people more mindful about their screen time without them feeling like they are actively fighting an urge, but rather making subtle changes. Some tools and methods I will use again are Miro and Figma. Figma is an application I had little experience with before this class, and through the prototyping processes, I was able to get a better idea of how to harness its features to create clickable prototypes and design blueprints for apps. In the future, I will probably use Figma to design front-end interfaces, to have a template to refer to when eventually coding it using front-end frameworks. Similarly, Miro is a new application that I learned about during this course. I think that for collaborative projects, it will become a useful tool to make maps using collected data. If I were to look back after 10 years, I think the most important thing I would learn is that you can’t solve every issue. One of the biggest obstacles we encountered in the early stages of our group work was trying to figure out how to solve issues for both of our personas Notification Nancy and Stressed Steve. On one hand, we could implement a series of notifications and screen limits that would make Stressed Steve aware of his doom scrolling, but this would only serve as another distraction for Notification Nancy. Thus, we decided to narrow our audience scope and only focus on one core issue, and after this, we were able to come to a creative, unique project. I believe that coming to this realization in itself was a monumental moment for our group and that when working on projects in the future, I will remember to not worry about solving solutions for everyone.
The mechanisms that our project uses to change behavior are subtle nudges and gamification. The most important aspect of our solution that we wanted to respect, no matter what we designed, was to feel personal and make the user themselves come to the conclusion to stop doom scrolling rather than physically locking them out. One feature that does this is the feature of being able to choose and customize their own cat. This process is intended to make users connect with their new companion and to feel some emotional response when the cat appears on the screen and starts to take up space. Instead of the user immediately brushing it away and turning off the app, we wanted the user to feel inconvenienced but also mindful about their actions, like a cat sitting on your laptop or covering the screen when you’re watching a movie or doing work. The gamification and shop/customization feature accomplishes 2 goals, the first being to further deepen the connection between the user and their cat and to provide motivation, and the second being that it allows the user to view their own progress and see how far they’ve come. I believe that these are acceptable nudges because it is helping users reduce mindless phone time and it intentionally evokes a response from the user that makes them feel like they should do something else. However, for users that fall easily into gamification, our project could potentially manipulate them.
One interesting consideration we had to discuss was privacy, specifically related to phone usage and personal goals. We actually performed an assumption test to figure out what people thought about essentially sharing their screen time and the apps they may be addicted to. With this in mind, we decided to make data more private and have users only able to share self-written reflections with each other and see how others have customized their cats. I believe this solution solves issues related to privacy because only seeing reflections and others’ cats can serve as motivation while not leaking any private data.
Coming out of this class, I believe I now think in a more attentive way when it comes to design and nudges. As mentioned before, I think that I can recognize manipulative techniques better and have gained the insight to think about long-term pictures and the implications of what people create. Also, specific to behavior change, I have a much better sense of what things work and don’t work when it comes to eliciting a behavioral response from a user. When faced with similar projects or scenarios in the future, I will use techniques used in this class and also use the new tools I was introduced to during this course. I hope to continue to utilize processes like needfinding and visual prototyping when creating and developing apps.
