Before this class, I thought that companies didn’t put too much thought into the behaviors of their users. I thought that companies were more focused on simply giving their consumers value. Additionally, I believed that companies made informed decisions about whether or not to proceed with launching a product, based on ethical consideration.s
What I loved about our final project was that our team each came into the class having individual ideas of what types of behaviors we wanted to change. When we decided on an idea, we kind of came together on a general behavior to change. Finally, over many discussions, prototypes, and sketches, we landed on a final design and product which was a beautiful mix of all of our team members’ ideas and contributions. What didn’t always work with regards to the approach we followed was that many times, it felt like we were simply going in circles without developing our idea too much. For example, we would make a story map and by the end of the experience, our idea for our design hadn’t changed to much. However, what I did like was the work near the end of the course where we were designing the visual aesthetic of the app. I didn’t realize that everyone can truly have completely different visions for the aesthetic of the app, and the app’s aesthetic completely impacts the user base. Hence, it was a great exercise to do things like make a vision board, design style tiles, or build early prototypes as a team because we all had to come together on a vision.
One thing that surprised me was that our group was actually able to find a way to change the behavior we landed on. Our chosen behavior was the avoidance of micro-responsibilities. This seemed like an incredibly vague problem, even though we knew many of us and our friends experienced it on a daily basis. But through our user studies and interviews, we eventually started realizing that in this day, the most stress-inducing micro-responsibility was responding to texts. This made me realize how important it is to actually talk to users – in our case, it helped us narrow the scope of our project incredibly well, allowing us to come up with a clear solution to a clear problem.
One ethical consideration that we had to make when deciding how we would change behaviors was, what main metric do we want to improve? Originally, our key metric was reducing the amount of time it took for users to respond to messages. However, we realized that this could harm well-being, if users feel pressured to constant be online, responding to messages instantly. Hence, we changed our goal to rather encouraging users to respond to messages within a time that they set for themselves (enabled through the self-nudging feature), which could be anywhere from an hour to a day.
Another one of our group’s main mechanisms for changing behavior was allowing a user’s friends to ‘nudge’ them on the app, which is essentially a notification that bumps a message to which the user hadn’t responded. We designed this feature with ethics in mind, as it has a key guardrail to prevent manipulation: when a friend nudges the user, they have a 1-hour cooldown period before being able to nudge the user again. This prevents the spamming of nudges. One way that we could take the ethicality a step further is by enabling a way for users to prevent nudges from certain people.
After completing this course, I now think that companies have entire teams dedicated to understanding a user’s behavior and figuring out to change it for the sake of their product. I think that this is often to the detriment of the user, as for-profit companies want to change behaviors in a way that benefits them, not the users. Additionally, I believe that companies often don’t even think about the ethics of the products that they’re building, as unfortunate as it is.
Next time, when I have to design a product on a team, I will make sure to conduct user interviews early on in the project in order to define and narrow the user needs that our product will focus on tackling. Additionally, I will make sure to do the early ideation and visual aesthetics part of building the product as a group, in order to make sure everyone’s contributed to the core of the product.
