Motivating Creativity and Mindfulness Through Accountability Interventions

 

For our project, we were curious to see how we could encourage people (particularly busy students) to incorporate creative practices into their daily lives. We learned from our pre-study interviews and baseline study that people want to try creative practices, but feel constrained by time and lack of ability. We saw that people are more inclined (or at least have reported) to follow through on doing something creative if they are doing it in a social setting or a dedicated class that is already in their schedule. For our intervention study, we tested certain assumptions and found out how to effectively prompt people to engage with a creative practice. We specifically looked into how to utilize anchoring, “smallification”, accountability, celebrating wins, and reducing difficulty.

Connection circle based on insights from diary study and user interviews

Based on the insights from our interviews and diary study, we ran an intervention study that paired participants with an accountability partner from our team. We noticed from our diary study and pre-study interviews that people will be more inclined to follow through on doing creative practices if they have committed to doing it with someone or who has a friend who reaches out to them. We reached out to our participants at the beginning of week 5 to get a sense of their own schedule to personalize when it would be most effective to send nudges to do a creative activity (to find potential anchors). For example, a nudge could look like this: 

 

From accountability partner: “Hey! I’m writing this poem about the sunset and need some help with the next line. Could you send me a suggestion?”

 

We felt that starting the creative process on our end would potentially help lower the intimidation barrier of doing something creative and tap into our participants’ overall inclination to do things collaboratively. While conducting this study, we were concerned that participants would be uncomfortable collaborating with or messaging someone they don’t know personally, and assigned ourselves to participants that we personally knew best. We also made the assumption that starting the creative process on our end would help lower the intimidation barrier, but kept in mind that it could constrain the creativity of the participants (since they would be drawing an image or writing based on what we send them).

 

Participant case studies

One study participant indicated to us that they enjoyed improv and typically felt they had free time in the evenings for the most part. We sent him daily prompts usually around ~8 pm and initially encouraged him to do improv games with friends in his dorm. While he started the week off strong, he quickly had his first failure on the second day of the study. In order to encourage him to get back into the habit, we changed the prompts to encourage lower effort tasks like making a playlist or a really short writing response (5-6 sentences). We also sent a message after a failure saying the following:

 

“We missed your creativity yesterday but looking forward to what you come with today!”

He responded indicating some guilt that he missed it and then responded to the new prompt for the day. 

Key Takeaways:

• Engaged with the prompts ⅗ days
• Showed a lot of energy and commitment at the beginning of the week
• Middle of the week (Tuesday-Thursday) proved to be more challenging for him
• Providing prompts that were seemingly lower effort correlated with a faster response time
• Getting a message that addressed a failure to response triggered an apologetic message and they seemed more committed after seeing it

 

Another participant indicated to us that they enjoyed creative writing and painting and typically felt they had random bits of downtown throughout the day. We sent her daily prompts usually around ~8 pm that were usually about doodling or doing a short free response creative writing exercise. Similarly to participant #1, they showed a lot of enthusiasm at the beginning of the week and expressed to us how excited they were about their first prompt because it was related to something she was talking about with her friends earlier. The middle of the week proved to be more challenging for her to respond so similarly to participant #1 we switched to prompts that required lower effort and that seemed to encourage her to respond faster to our prompts. She also noted that on the weekend, even though our prompts were geared to take anywhere from 5-10 minutes, that she spent a few hours on her last prompt and worked on it with a friend.

 

Key Takeaways:

• • Engaged with the prompts ⅗ days
  • Showed a lot of energy and commitment at the beginning of the week
  • Middle of the week (Tuesday-Thursday) proved to be more challenging for her
  • Providing prompts that were seemingly lower effort correlated with a faster response time
  • Expressed more interest in prompts that were related to engaging in a creative activity or practice with a friend
  • Spent more time on prompts over the weekend

• Getting a message that addressed a failure to response triggered an apologetic message and they seemed more committed after seeing it

 

A few screenshots of the intervention study in action, with some photos of some of the creativity prompts participants were given: 

What Worked:

• Lower effort prompts (for example: doodle for 5 minutes or sending a song request, versus play a game and record it)
• Sending gentle reminders when they forget a prompt
• Sending slightly personalized messages instead of the same cookie cutter message
• Sending celebratory messages to their creative responses.
• Making it sound more personal – e.g. use their names, share feelings and reactions about their responses, etc.

 

What Didn’t:

• Sending prompts at the same time everyday -> certain days worked better than others, and people took different amounts of time to respond depending on the day.
• High effort prompts that required relocating or using resources that weren’t immediately available