Before…
Before this class, I had no idea what to expect. When I thought about changing behavior, I would only really think about it from a narrow perspective that applies to myself and my behaviors. For example, when I was addicted to junk food in high school, I’d simply stop buying snacks, so I wouldn’t have easy access to them (which now I know as “adding friction”). Behavior change for me has always been from a “for myself only” angle. I’ve never really thought about behavior change as a science or a formula that would work universally for some target group.
General reflection
My favorite part about this class was getting to work on an awesome team. We had fun and laughed a lot, but when it came down to work, we meshed well and were efficient at tackling our tasks. I also loved seeing the friends I interviewed grow and pay more attention their exercise habits—myself included! Because of this project, I was motivated to pay more attention to my own workout routine (which was lacking) and have built a better habit over the course of this quarter.
I also found some of the science behind building habits intriguing and cool. For one, I’ve never heard of anchoring before, but have been since thinking about ways I could tie that into my own life (for example doing a handstand every time I enter my room, to build upper body strength).
What I didn’t enjoy as much was having to come up with a solution and crank out a prototype in an extremely short amount of time, which felt forced. With more time to think and parse through our previous tasks, I believe we could have come up with a better and more thought-out solution. I also don’t like how the final paper is all about reframing every past task to fit with our product, especially given we’ve already documented our thought process in a more genuine way along the way. It felt unnatural, was stressful, and didn’t help me to learn.
Generally, the most challenging part of this class was realizing that everyone has a different set of struggles, even within the same realm. I think what’s hard about large scale behavior change is that even within specific groups, people are still different and it’s very hard to create a broad solution that’s supposed to help everyone. Even within specific struggles, people had even more specific and varying needs and pain points. The personas didn’t feel like they represented the population we conducted studies on because there simply wasn’t one type of person, and that made the rest of the process difficult.
I think the core issue with students and exercise frequency is largely still time at the end of the day. In the future, I’d lean away from the type of product we created, and maybe lean into a product that is able to tackle the time issue. I think an app that comes up with creative solutions to help people multitask with work, social and workout would be amazing. For example, if someone has a lot of lectures to watch, we can recommend a lecture and walk on treadmill session, so that in the same period of time, the person is able to accomplish both work and workout. If someone wants to catch up with a friend, they can go do a lift together while catching up, or go to a workout class together etc. This solution also fits in with the current culture of doing a billion things at once (which may not be a good thing). That being said, I foresee the variety of exercise types being an issue.
One of the coolest skills I learned that I think will be really useful for the future is making and using components on Figma. Somehow, up until this point, I’ve manually connected everything by hand, which has been tedious and frustrating, but my life has since been changed. Thanks to Jack, I learned that for elements that appear across screens, I can just create a component and copy it across screens for convenience, meaning I only have to link the element once but that it works across screens.
Ethics
Our solution seeks to improve exercise habits through a couple of different methods. First of all, our swiping feature seeks to gamify and reduce the friction of picking exercise and finding alternatives, which is an especially big challenge for beginners. Some may say swiping is addictive and ethically incorrect like the recent lawsuit against dating apps, however in this context, things work very differently. For example, under our solo exercise option, if you swipe right, you will 100% match with the exercise (it’s not a volatile human on the other end). In my point of view, what makes the swiping on dating apps addictive is the need for validation, lack of good matches, and the hope for someone to reciprocate the like, which are elements that are not involved in our swiping process. Even for the group exercise swipe, those on there are already your friends and you have a mutual understanding that you are both working towards the same goal—for the betterment of the team.
We also create a sense of motivational pressure by putting emphasis on the competition aspect and showing both team rankings as well as personal contributions on the home page of the app. This nudges the user to feel a certain way when they first enter the app. One could argue competition can get toxic, but our intention is for the communal team goal aspect to balance out the potentially toxic competitive aspects while maintaining a helpful amount of pressure. Users can also opt out by simply not opening the app (we did not plan on using excessive notifications).
In terms of privacy, we need to think more deeply about what options we want to give users in terms of sharing, showing and managing their data within the app. For example, if we wanted to develop the app further, we’d need to consider the option for users to hide their workout log details if they so choose in case they didn’t feel comfortable with others seeing the specifics. We’d also want to think about how to store the data people log on our app securely, and consider whether or not we want to use the data in some way to understand users more in order to develop a better system for the users, and how to go about asking for permission for that.
An aspect of ethics that is particular to our case may actually be thinking about how to keep people honest on the app. With self-reported logs, people could lie about their contributions and make the competition unfair, resulting in losing track of the actual fitness goal. We should spend more time figuring out how to help people to contribute meaningfully and honestly instead of trying to game the system—healthy competition can’t exist without mutual trust of respecting the system.
Now I think…
I think this project has prompted me to think more deeply about what really causes us to make the little choices we do and really dive into the complexity of it all. It’s also taught me that not everything is what it seems like on the surface—behind those who work out every day intensively is not someone who has a higher drive than the rest, but someone who makes the daily choice to commit to their goals.
Next time…
Next time, when faced with a similar situation, I have a larger toolbox to solve the problems at hand. I can see myself using diagrams (especially connection circles) to figure out the complex causation of an event. I can also see myself using my new Figma knowledge to build more polished products, and using my new sketching skills to convey my thoughts more vividly and efficiently.
