Before CS247B
Before taking this class, I had some basic knowledge of some of the popular behavior change methods and a basic understanding of the underlying psychological principles that drive human behavior. I had read the first half of the Tiny Habits book and even tried the tiny habits method for a couple of weeks a year back. Additionally, I have always been very interested in human psychology and am a big fan of the podcast Hidden Brain, which is a weekly podcast about what makes us tick as well as what leads us to have certain thoughts and do certain things. However, other than the AP Psychology class I took back in high school, I had no other formal education experience learning about behavior change, not to mention designing a product that promotes behavior change. Therefore, I was very excited to learn more about behavioral psychology and ways I can apply my HCI skills to a very practical problem that has the potential of changing people and their lives.
In CS247B
Conducting Interviews and Studies
One very pleasant surprise I had around midway through the course was that I found myself to be a lot more comfortable with and excited about interviewing people and conducting studies than I expected. Probably because of the difficult prior experiences with CS147 (I was on a small team which made the already heavy course even more challenging), I was somewhat dreading having to recruit and interview participants for the baseline and intervention studies towards the beginning of the course. Being a habitual overthinker and constant “worrier” definitely didn’t help with the recruiting process. However, I started to really enjoy interviewing participants after the first couple interviews went well. I found the process of designing and running the studies to be very interesting as well. The fact that a couple participants were excited about participating in both studies made it all very rewarding, especially because of the nature of the studies. The participants’ willingness to keep participating signaled that they trusted me (and my team) with whatever behavior change methods we designed for them, and that made the experience very special. I’m really glad that I’m able to see my HCI soft skills like interviewing and designing studies grow in this class.
Designing for Behavior Change
The tools and methods we learned in this course were eye-opening and helpful on a personal level. I especially liked the exposure to different behavior change frameworks, including tiny habits, nudging, and the switch system. It’s important to learn about different types of frameworks for inducing behavior change because there truly isn’t a “one size fits all” way to do things. Moreover, different methods may work differently for the same person facing different life circumstances or dealing with different types of behavior, so I appreciated gaining knowledge in several frameworks that I can keep in mind in the future for both personal benefits and professional/career work. However, there were some parts of the course that I felt were not very relevant to behavior change, such as product branding and business model considerations. I inherently enjoyed those exercises and project works because of the design aspect of them, but I wish that we had spent more time focusing on “designing for behavior change” and went beyond product branding and marketing. The baseline and intervention studies were definitely my favorite part of the course because they helped me learn about potential users’ challenges and psychology on a personal level.
Ethical Considerations
One new thing I got to take away from this course related to ethics was that different people have different levels of motivation and abilities to work towards their behavior change goals, and that we need to pay more attention to these differences between people that might not be obvious to us. For the baseline study, I interviewed a potential participant who revealed to me some of their health conditions that often impacted their executive function in the morning. The participant told me that they had high motivation to improve their morning routine because they understood that it could make their day much better (more productive, healthier, and brighter), but they simply were unable to take much action to meet their goals due to health issues. Having directly learned about this person’s desires and difficulties made me realize that not everyone is simply “lazy” to make change. In fact, most people’s failure to make a positive change to their behavior is not due to laziness but a myriad of complex and complicated factors. Therefore, it’s not fair or productive to design a product that promotes behavior change with the mindset that all people need to make a change is to be more motivated and more diligent. To develop any solution aimed at helping people change their unwanted/negative behavior, we need to actually understand their stories and their struggles.
After CS247B
My previous paragraphs have pretty much captured what I now think of the topic of behavior change – it’s very important to first gain a good understanding of people’s stories and current behavior before attempting to design a solution to help them make a change to their behavior.
Moving Forward
Having gained first hand experience with designing an app for behavior change and the complex ethical implications around the topic, I would definitely keep ethical considerations at the top of my mind if I were to work on a similar project in the future. I still feel that I am not well-versed enough in the psychology aspect of behavior change, so it would be very helpful to learn more about what sorts of methods can induce certain types of behavior change and why they work. In addition, I would hope to learn more about how certain health conditions and disabilities impact an individual’s motivation and executive function in order to make my design and product as inclusive as possible. After all, this is about building a technology for people to become a better version of themselves, and so the design process must center around people’s individual stories and wellbeing.
