Before this course, I had no idea how to persuade people to change their behavior. I knew that people were always looking to change, but I had never given much thought into how to build a product to aid them. I don’t think I have ever used an app successfully to change my own behavior.
I enjoyed this class this quarter. Although we had a rough start (since we had to completely switch our idea midway through the quarter), I feel pretty happy with our final product. I thought it was really interesting seeing how the studies illuminated peoples’ motivations to us. Our first study showed us that we needed to switch from music to another topic since the field was already oversaturated with options and most people were pretty content with their music listening habits. This course has given me a lot of different tools and strategies to design products that help people with behavior change.
I also really enjoyed and appreciated our ethics discussion. There were a lot of really cool people in the class who brought up great points. I’ve been in quite a few computer science courses at Stanford and this was the first time I really feel like the ethics discussions applied to what we were learning in class. The ethics discussions always felt relevant and nuanced. Every week,I looked forward to hearing what my classmates had to say and I felt like it was really important that we examined our own ideas for their ethical impact. We added a few key features to our product after these discussions and I think without them, our app would be incomplete.
I think the most important thing that I got out of this class was working in a healthy group. I think that unlike other classes I was in, the group that I was in felt more balanced. Because we all became pretty good friends, we stayed accountable to one another and did the work we had to do. Our group text was always full of messages of when people would do the work that they were assigned or people letting us know when they were available to work on things. When we were coming up with questions for our intervention study, we actually started using our app idea and got closer to one another (I now know what dreams each of my teammates has given up on). I always looked forward to going to class because I enjoyed sitting with my group and working with them on the group work.
I can honestly say that I’m going to miss this class. I had a great time with the material, my team, and the rest of the class.
