Before this class, I mostly thought about behavior change as forming habits. I knew that a lot of New Year’s resolutions fail because people focus too much on the end goal rather than the steps to get there. But this course introduced me to different ways of thinking about behavior, like bubble mapping and connection circles, which helped me break things down and communicate insights more clearly. I started seeing behavior change as something more layered and complex than just habit formation.
One of the biggest challenges we faced was in our baseline study. Since we mainly reached out to people we knew, we ended up with a pretty limited range of perspectives, which made it harder to pull out meaningful insights. It felt like we hit a wall. But later, when we reached out to strangers on the internet for our intervention study, we got much richer responses, and that made all the difference. It really drove home the importance of seeking out diverse perspectives when studying human behavior.
That said, I still wonder how useful our baseline study actually was, especially since we didn’t use the same participants in both phases. We also made a big pivot after the baseline study, realizing we had been targeting the wrong audience. If the goal of the baseline study was to help us make that shift, then I guess it worked—but I think more guidance in connecting the two phases would’ve been helpful.
When designing our intervention, we debated between two main approaches: a therapy-based solution, since impulse shopping is often tied to emotional needs (like anxiety, loneliness, or dopamine-seeking), or a simple behavior-blocking method that replaced shopping with a different activity. We went with the second option because it seemed like the easiest first step, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was just a temporary fix. We weren’t really addressing the underlying emotions, and after reading through r/shoppingaddiction, I saw how serious this issue could be. Some people are in lifelong debt because of it. That made me hesitant about posting our study in that community since I wasn’t sure our approach was strong enough to help.
One moment that really stuck with me was when we realized our intervention actually caused one participant to relapse. What we thought would be an inspiration board ended up being their shopping wishlist. That hit hard because it showed how unpredictable human behavior can be and how easy it is for an intervention to backfire. It made me rethink the responsibility that comes with designing behavior change tools. This was a real reminder that even with the best intentions, you can’t always control how people will interact with your work.
Our intervention was meant to nudge people away from impulse shopping by giving them something else to do instead. That’s an acceptable nudge in some cases, but were we really helping, or just redirecting the problem? In some situations, this might be enough, but for people with deeper struggles, it felt like a surface-level fix.
If I were to do this again, I’d push for a better baseline study that connects more clearly to the intervention. I’d also want to dig deeper into the root causes of behavior rather than just finding a quick fix. And I’d be more mindful of unintended consequences. This experience made me realize how important it is to test interventions carefully and think through possible consequences before rolling them out. While we did consider consequences of our product longer term, I think more consideration about the baseline and intervention study consequences would be beneficial to the class.
