Before this class, I thought behavior change was mostly about discipline. If someone wanted to build a better habit, I assumed they just had to want it enough and stay consistent. I also thought design was mainly about making something look clean, organized, and easy to use. I knew users mattered, but I did not fully understand how much good design depends on understanding people’s real lives, not just their goals. This class changed that for me.
Working on our project about student eating habits made me realize how easy it is to oversimplify behavior. At first, I thought irregular eating was mostly a time-management problem: students are busy, so they skip meals or eat at random times, and the solution is to help them be more consistent. But once we started our baseline study, the problem felt more complicated. Students were not eating irregularly because they did not care. Many of them did want to eat better. The issue was that their days were unpredictable, their schedules were packed, and convenience often won over intention. That was probably the biggest thing I learned in this class: behavior is not just a personal choice. It is shaped by context. Students make food decisions based on deadlines, stress, energy, location, what is open, what is affordable, and what feels realistic in the moment. I used to think of habits as something that came from within. Now I think habits are also deeply tied to what a person’s environment makes possible.
One thing I really liked about this class was how much it pushed us to question our assumptions. Since I am also a student, it would have been easy to think I already understood this experience. But doing the baseline study reminded me that being part of the same group does not mean I understand everyone’s motivations or challenges. Even when people have similar schedules on paper, they can experience them very differently. That was humbling, and honestly, really important for me. I also liked that the class treated design as an iterative process instead of something you get right the first time. A lot of my other academic work feels like it is about producing the polished final answer, but this class made space for confusion, revision, and even changing the question itself. I particularly enjoyed methods like interviews, journey mapping, and assumption mapping, because they helped turn vague ideas into something tangible that we could test and improve—and they’re tools I can genuinely see myself using again.
One challenge was understanding the gap between what students said they wanted and what their daily lives actually allowed. Many students wanted healthier, more regular eating habits, but their environments did not support that. When your schedule is overloaded and healthy options are limited or inconvenient, it is hard to act on good intentions. That made me realize there are limits to what design can do when the larger system is working against the user. That is still the most unresolved part of the project for me. Our work made me think about how much responsibility gets placed on individuals to “make better choices,” even when those choices are shaped by institutional conditions. If students do not have reliable access to healthy food that fits into their routines, then the problem is not just their behavior. It is also the system around them.
Over time, the ethical side of the project became a much more important part of how I thought about the work. started thinking more seriously about the difference between helping and controlling. Any project that tries to change behavior can become pushy or judgmental, even if it starts with good intentions. I came away feeling that the best designs do not shame people into changing. They support reflection, reduce friction, and help people make choices that feel meaningful to them. Now I think behavior change is less about “fixing” people and more about understanding what they are responding to. I also think design is much more about empathy and accountability than I realized before. Next time I face a similar situation, I want to spend more time understanding the problem before jumping to solutions. I want to ask better questions, test my assumptions earlier, and think more carefully about the systems around the user, not just the user alone.
