Being in Nature
Midpoint Write Up
Team 8
Problem Domain and Motivation
From speaking with friends and examining our daily routines, our team realized that some Stanford students struggle to spend quality time outside. Spending time outdoors improves people’s moods and reduces their stress levels. Thus, our problem domain is to help students develop a daily habit of spending time outside to aid in their well-being.
Baseline Study
Our baseline study aimed to understand people’s daily lives and how it relates to the habit of going outside. Specifically, we wanted to understand what encourages people to spend more time outdoors and what stops them from doing so.
We screened for participants within the college student age range (~16-30 years old) who spend little time outdoors for reasons outside of being a means to an end, such as traveling from one destination to another or taking a smoke break, and who desired to spend more time outdoors. We screened 16 individuals, 13 of which passed the screening, and 9 completed the study.
We used our pre-study interviews to get an idea of our participants’ general routines, previous notions they had about going outside, and methods they used to increase their time outdoors in the past.
We conducted our baseline study over five weekdays. Participants filled in an entry in a template sheet every time they went outside for ~fifteen minutes or longer. Participants were also regularly reminded to fill their sheets. They recorded the duration of their outdoor session, their mood before and after going outdoors, and the activity they engaged in while outside. These entries helped us notice patterns in different participants’ habits regarding the outdoors and what activities proved more effective at fulfilling their needs for nature time.
We used affinity mapping, frequency mapping, and a connection circle to understand our data.
Affinity mapping:
- Participants spent the most time outside when heading somewhere, like class or Tressider, or taking a smoking break with friends.
- Successful attempts to increase outdoor time include running or walking to a destination instead of biking or taking the bus.
Frequency mapping:
- Biking or walking outside was how most participants spent time outdoors.
- Participants would like to spend more time outside, especially when immersed in nature.
Connection circle:
- Doing homework negatively impacts the amount of time spent outdoors.
- Spending time with friends and eating meals positively impacts the time spent outdoors.
- Loop between improved mood, spending time outside, and time with friends.
- Loop between great weather, spending time outdoors, and improved mood.
Our insights guided our decision to capitalize on habits already ingrained in our users’ lives to build a habit of going outside.
Comparative Research and Analysis
Competitors Overview
Helps plans visits outdoors
These competitors encourage people to spend time outdoors by acting as a guide to the outdoors. They help people do outdoor activities by providing information about ideal locations to do said activities.
Goal Tracker
Although this app is more general and broad than the other apps in our comparative review, we felt it was pertinent to include it to explore how apps go about encouraging general habit building. Finch is a self-care virtual companion app that grows every time you accomplish one of your goals.
Primary focus encourage time outside with specific metrics
Some people are encouraged to build habits by looking at their progress and their experiences as bite-sized, digestible quantified data.
Gamifies time outside
The following apps encourage users to spend time outside in nature. They get users to walk around by placing goals at different locations that users have to physically go to in order to gain the rewards. This gamification of the outdoors has become increasingly popular and often utilizes augmented reality (AR) technology.
Open Market
Our Product
We want to give users more control over their habit formation by allowing them to choose their activities, locations, goals, and even their nudges, anchors, and celebrations.
Our ideal app would reach a wide audience, is reusable and high impact, and requires not a lot of effort. The effort piece is one of the most important yet difficult parts of that equation, since we anticipate a lot of our users being busy and unable to add a high effort habit to their routine. To get around this obstacle, we are hoping to tie usage of our app to other, already in use behaviors, such as calendar management. If our app can be integrated into a user’s existing calendar habits, we can provide that high level of impact and reusability without adding too much additional effort.
Literature Review
Important Insights
We extracted the following key information from our literature review and will ensure to keep these principles in mind during the production of our intervention idea and final product.
- We asked participants to be in nature and not just outside because
- Time in natural spaces is an effective way to improve mood, focus and physiological markers like blood pressure and heart rate
- be less stressed, depressed and likely to ruminate.
- The Nature Play group found that increasing the presence of nature such as the amount of plants will result in an environment that increases diversity of play and curiosity in the outdoors so they naturalize
- People need to spend time in nature to receive the benefits of being outdoors as indicated here, here, and here
- Our app format may be a guide to the outdoors because
- Claritin’s The Outsideologist Project found that people lose inspiration and interest after unstructured 30 minutes outdoors.
- AllTrails, Relive, OuterSpatial, and Dog Spot Beach all follow this model.
- We knew that we only needed to ask our busy participants to spend 10-50 minutes in natural spaces in order to receive the health benefits.
Due to flaws in sunlight research, we rather focus on being in nature than in sunlight.
Personas and Journey Maps Key Insights
Two key subpopulations: busy body versus the outdoorsy stoner persona.
- The first persona is characteristic of individuals who may be in need to develop this habit.
- The latter simply represents individuals who need more structure to their outside time.
From these insights, we realized our app can serve as an outdoor guide for the first type of persona, and users from the outdoor stoner persona benefit from the routine structure that calendar integration/tracking tools provide.
Intervention/Product Ideation
Intervention ideas:
- Have people eat at least one meal (or take their coffee) outside near natural space per day.
Pros
- Incorporating natural space element, which is shown to improve well-being
- Attaches itself to another habit that one might already have
- People more likely to complete due to ease
Cons
- Hard to do in rainy/cold weather
- Have people take one lap around Lake Lag everyday
Pros
- Incorporates both blue space and green space (best of both worlds)
- Incorporates a bit of exercise as well
- Fun activity to do with friends
- Can be done more easily in cold weather
Cons
- Lake Lag is far for people on East campus
- Possibility of low completion rate
- Hard to do in rainy weather
- Does not attach itself to any pre-existing habit
- Have people take some deep breaths outside after a work session.
Pros
- Incorporates an element of meditation with going outside
- Attaches itself to a habit people already have
Cons
- Hard to do in rainy/cold weather
- Ambiguous and hard to define “work session”
- Might not add up to enough time outside to cause any differences in mood
Our decision
We decided to go with our first idea. We came up with this idea after thinking about the reading Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, where it was discussed that adding one habit on top of another is highly effective. This is especially critical for our target audience as they are busy and have little free time so stacking habits will save them time.
Participants
For our participants, we selected students who felt as though they did not get enough satisfying time outdoors. All of our participants had a desire to increase the amount of time they spent in nature, not just outdoor time in general.
Intervention study
Protocol
For our intervention study, we asked people to have a meal, snack or drink outside surrounded by some sort of nature. At the end of the day, we send them a google form that asks them about the place, time of day, who they had their snack with, and their mood.
Our goal is to figure out if there is any correlation between spending time outside and our participants’ corresponding mood. We also are hoping to see if connecting meal times to outside is an easy and positive change that people can integrate into their lives. Due to the freedom of being able to choose whichever meal, we expect this change should not be hard for students to integrate into their lives.
Key Insights
One of our key insights is that although people tend to enjoy eating outside, it is somewhat conditional. We somewhat expected that bad weather would be a deterrent, but we did not think the timing of it being too early could also be a deterrent. It also seems that if people are already super stressed out, just going outside is not necessarily enough to reduce their stress or increase their mood. Their responses end up being along the lines of “I was super stressed, and being outside was cool but I was just outside and stressed.” This means that just eating a meal outside might not be immersive enough for a pronounced mood change when one is heavily stressed, as going for a hike might be. However, most people reported feeling happy, or very nice after being outside, so if one does not already start with a terrible mood it seems to have a calming effect.
Using these key insights, we will move towards designs that are still nature-based, allowing for more freedom for the users. We are shifting away from attaching the outdoors to eating habits. If the only meal that users can fit in outside is an early morning breakfast (and it wouldn’t improve their mood because it is so cold during that time), we are not adding an extra inconvenience for the user. Instead, we want to shift more towards photography, and a design based around collecting photos. This approach would still incorporate nature, but also would incorporate the game aspect of tokenization. This approach also would also make it easier for users to endure colder temperatures, as they are not sitting down.
This is one map that helped us synthesize the data and find one of our key insights.
Storyboard & Stories
Storyboards Product Goal:
(1) Allow the stoner persona to bring their stories and interactions outside
(2) Encourage the “anxious lab worker” to go outside after a long time indoors.
First storyboard: Realizing an important quality about the stoner persona was that they wanted to spend more quality time outside
Second storyboard: Do we want to look into time or motivation as failing to exercise outside?
Third storyboard: A caffeine drinker struggles to relax, so perhaps they can have their coffee outside
Current Direction
Our team has decided that moving forward we will be trying to create an app that utilizes frequent nudges to help our users build the habit of spending time outside. From our baseline and intervention studies, we have identified a number of areas that our app can focus on from which we believe our users would derive the most benefit. These include Nudge Notifications, Weather Monitoring, Location Suggestions, Activity Suggestions, and Habit Tracking.
