Final Reflection
Before this class, I thought about design specifically for behavior change as a subset of design in general. I didn’t think designers needed to consider behavior change implications in all projects. Now I better understand that all design is behavior change design, and, as designers, it is our responsibility to always consider how the things we create can affect others’ behavior. Throughout the quarter, I worked with my teammates to create a platform for stimulating deeper conversations in order to allow people to create meaningful connections with others. Initially, we were determined to create a platform to help music listeners find new songs to listen to each day, but we ultimately had to pivot away from this idea. This change of course was definitely the biggest challenge and surprise we faced this quarter. This change caused a lot of tension within our team, but we were ultimately able to agree on a new path to follow through open and honest communication. I really liked our initial project idea, and I do wish that we had been able to continue exploring the idea, even though the market is already saturated. I was personally very passionate about the idea, as I have done a lot of other work at Stanford involving the psychological perception of music and how music can act as a form of therapy. I think the idea had a lot of potential, and I think our team could have learned a lot from pursuing it. If I could change anything about this class experience, I wish that my team was encouraged to carry on with this idea from the perspective of how we, personally, could learn and grow from it, instead of being discouraged to pursue it based on the plausibility of succeeding in the existing market. That said, I’m grateful my team could decide on another project that we all liked.
I’m proud of the work we accomplished, and I especially enjoyed creating the clickable prototype on Figma. I really enjoyed our ethical conversations about nudging and learning about notifications/anchors, and it was really interesting to see how we all took these new learnings into consideration when creating our Figma prototype. Additionally, I found our consideration of personas especially helpful. Throughout the design process, I found it incredibly helpful to think about our personas, their needs, and how we can specifically design for them. Similarly, thinking about how different personas/users may find our platform by different entry points was a very creative and interesting exercise that I enjoyed a lot.
As far as ethical considerations, one thing that I thought about a lot during our design process was privacy. A large part of the functionality of our platform is allowing users to reflect on their experiences in logs. These logs are whatever the user needs them to be – they can hold simple notes or their deepest thoughts. As a result, we have a large responsibility to protect this information. Additionally, when a user asks their friend a question, that friend may not feel comfortable having our user write down their thoughts on our platform. We tried to help mitigate this issue by communicating to our users that we would not share their data. This fix does not, however, ease the minds of the friends who are providing their own personal, emotional information for these logs. This question of how we can provide for the privacy of non-users on our platform is an issue I don’t think we efficiently solved, and it is a question I have been continuing to think about.
Lastly, I was very grateful to work with a team of five people, as having multiple designers helped us to catch more ethical concerns as they arose during the design process. I think our unique experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives allowed us to be more inclusive and conscious of others. In the future when faced with a similar design problem, I plan to seek out another large, diverse team of designers to work with.
Thank you so much for a great, insightful quarter!
Cat Davis
