Before this class, I thought that designing for behavior change was waaay easier than it turned out to be. I think I truly overestimated even my own capacity and want to change.
I did this work with these experiences…
What did you love? What did you hate?
I loved my team dynamic, whoever made the teams (I think Amy) is a real teambuilding wizard.
What tools and methods do you think you’ll use again? What tools and methods didn’t feel like the right fit?
I will definitely use bubble diagrams again!
What surprises did you experience? What turned out like you expected?
One big surprise for me this quarter was finally getting convinced of the effectiveness of sketchnotes. I have done sketchnotes in many classes, but always seemed unconvinced by them. I tend to keep my art and writing so separate that it really stressed me out to put them together. The pop quiz was what convinced. In the middle of the pop quiz I realized that I had cues for concepts that I could not remember the name of off the top of my head. The specific example was a sink and mirror I drew as part of the tiny prompts sketchnote.
What underlying issues (personal, interpersonal, societal) surfaced as a result of this experience?
I don’t know if I would call this an issue but I did learn that I am not as bothered about my phone habits as many people seem to be. I honestly love being on my phone and don’t find that it sucks my time away. It was an interesting thing to learn about myself.
What do you think you’ll remember if anything, ten years from now?
I think I will remember the “After I pee, I will read.” concept aka habit stacking. I do think having a funny example and mental image of it is a great cue for remembering these types of skills.
What do you wish went differently?
I sort of wish we had more time to tweak the prototype. I know that this is the reality of a 10 week quarter, but I wish we could sit more with our visual design decisions. I also wish we figured out our actual app idea earlier on (like our MVP). Through some of the exercises we really were operating with the reading while going to the toilet idea for a very long time (we did all love this dark horse idea but we could not figure out a way to really bring it to life).
Ethical considerations
Nudging and Manipulation:
Our project played around with nudges a lot. Because we felt our topic was quite innocent, we felt we had a little more leeway in terms of nudges. The app switcher functionality could be argued as being quite manipulative, so we had a lot of discussions about how to approach it. We needed to find a happy medium of the nudge being effective, while still giving agency and autonomy to the user
Interface Design & Design Justice:
I think we tried to not rely on “universality”, especially in the creation of our proto-personas. In our group, each member of the team basically came up with a different proto-persona that had different goals with reading. Some wanted to read for fun, some were PhD students wanting to read more research papers, some wanted to stay informed and caught up with the news. We tried to really incorporate these diverse perspectives into the design process. In terms of Inclusive Design, I think we have a long way to go. Although we did agree on the inclusion of pretty much anything as reading, audiobooks, physical books, articles, news, our app design is definitely not as accessible as we would hope and would need a lot of modifications before deployment (especially for screen readers).
Now I think that designing for behavior change is extremely complex and should not be taken lightly. The ethics discussions were extremely helpful to me. I think it made the whole team think “should we be doing this at all?”, “who are we to say which behaviors are good and bad?”. I do think that that is part of the reason we chose reading, as it seemed like a somewhat uncontroversial topic that we all felt quite interested in. There are so many things to consider and I was glad we got to have weekly discussions about the ethics of our projects.
Next time when faced with a similar situation I will:
- Try different techniques than the ones we learned about in CS 147.
- Always think about something should even be designed in the first place, before I think about how to design it.
- Try out behavior change techniques on myself first. I need to understand the user experience in practice and not just in theory.
- Stretch, even if it’s just at my desk.
