A design project for my Designing For Behavior Change class at Stanford.
Completed with four other teammates over ten weeks (Jan-Mar 2021).
My Hats: participant recruitment, user experience research, and digital prototyping. Everyone did a little bit of everything, but those were my largest roles.
The Problem
Instead of traveling to the office, classroom, or coffee shop, students and newly remote workers roll out of their beds and into the chair in front of their desk. When work never needs to leave the desk, our participants found themselves struggling to leave their desks to take a break too.
The students and newly remote workers we talked to were used to taking a few breaks on their phones, but now they said it felt like it was the only thing they did for a break. They expressed a desire to take some of those breaks outside, but the inertia of sitting at their desk and the inability to meet friends left them describing the idea of short breaks outside as “aimless” or “boring.” There was little pushing them to go outside, and not much to do when they did.
Process
Early Brainstorming
When discussing possible behaviors to influence for our project, we were all interested in exercising more, then we discovered that each of us were ashamed to answer a simpler question: “How much time have you spent outside this week?” Encouraging people to simply spend more time outside regardless of their activity felt like an accessible goal for a wide variety of people, and it wasn’t something that would take too much time out of anyone’s day.
Recruitment
Our recruitment process started by reaching out to people in our network, making an effort to contact as many non-students as students. We found a few participants this way, but our recruitment really took off once we reached out to larger groups of people. I ended up recruiting eight possible participants by messaging the Slack workspace for CS106A and 106B section leaders with the following message:
(Now that I have a clearer idea of what the class project involves, I think there are a few wordings I would change in this message, but it conveyed the right ideas.)
Screening and Baseline Study
We set up short interviews to make sure each possible participant was interested in spending more time outside, and confirmed the participant was willing to go through a five-day tracking period.
Ten of our participants completed at least five days of tracking for our baseline study.
After the tracking period, our group met to discuss and analyze the results.
These distributions only offer shallow insights, but they confirmed that we were on the right track. Our participants were generally unsatisfied with their time spent outside, and they usually felt like they had some opportunity to go outside.
A deeper pattern was found when we looked at participants’ responses to “What motivated or discouraged you” on days where they had low satisfaction with time outside:
No reason to go outside (and I’m TIRED!!)
Being busy and nothing to motivate me to go outside discouraged me!
zoom, i immediately fell asleep after lol
Responsibility and a desire to save energy
Even though our participants said they almost always had time to go outside, and our screener made sure they wanted to go outside, participants felt too busy and going outside felt pointless.
We interviewed our participants after the baseline and built up these personas:
The Solution
Our process for getting to a solution involved a substantial amount of backtracking. That’s to be expected for design projects, but in our case it was discouraging to have several rounds of prototypes that barely worked at all, even though we did learn from them.
First Prototype
Our first prototype was aimed at solving the “aimless” aspect of going outside. People felt like they didn’t have a reason, and we wanted to give them one. We decided to call the activities we would give people “tasks.”
We prototyped this by texting participants a task to do each day, asking them to do this activity when they wanted a break. They would complete the task by submitting a google form with a photo or video.
And… we had four tasks turned in by three participants. Our participants frequently forgot about the tasks, and also said that when they took a break they didn’t think about it, they just got out their phone. However, the three participants who did complete tasks said they really enjoyed it.
More prototyping
So we backtracked, and realized that we wanted to disrupt the breaks people took without thinking, what we decided to call “weak” breaks. More ideas and more prototyping later, we wanted our app to do two things: prompt users to take “strong” breaks, and give out tasks.
The app prompt users to take “strong” breaks in two ways: Scheduled Prompts and Distraction Prompts. Scheduled prompts are meant to follow and build on natural transitions; like when you leave a weekly zoom meeting. Distraction prompts are meant to offer a direct replacement for “weak” breaks by detecting when a user tries to open an app like Instagram and prompting them. Once a user is prompted, they’re directed to choose a task.
Key Results and Future Thoughts
Our prototype received a positive but constrained response in usability testing. Testers said they liked what the app could do, but had a lot of feedback about how it felt to use it. Our usability tests showed problems in three main areas, and I will suggest fixes for each area based on feedback.
- Our app lacked a clear first impression. The first page of the app we presented to testers was confusing. It didn’t say anything about what the app was for, and it didn’t do much to guide users in the right direction. To address this we would:
1: Give the app a home page. This homepage should have a tagline about what our app is for, and there should be obvious buttons for: getting a task, adding a scheduled prompt, and adding a distraction prompt.
2: Add an onboarding or tutorial. When users open the app for the first time, users should have the option to see some guided examples that would add context to the ideas of tasks, scheduled prompts, and distraction prompts.
- Prompt creation was unintuitive. A handful of small design of design mistakes made the the prompt creation flow disorienting. To address this we would:
3: Chunk the prompt creation flow into smaller pieces. Instead of offering the user so many options on one screen, creating a prompt would be split into several screens with 1–2 key elements on them.
4: Remove the shared “Advanced Settings” screen. Both distraction and scheduled prompts shared an “Advanced Settings” screen, but the two prompt types were two distinctive to make this abstraction understandable.
- Limited options didn’t give users enough feeling of control. Especially in the case of task choice, users wanted more than a choice between two tasks.
5: Test more task choice variations. Some users wanted a big list, and some users wanted to pick from a category then be surprised. We would test more variations to see what works best, possibly even making the task choice options configurable.
6: Test more prompt variations. Some users wanted the app to totally block distracting apps, others wanted a dismissable reminder. Some users wanted passive reminders when a scheduled prompt kicked in, others wanted an alarm. We would test more variations and try to make the prompts as configurable as possible while balancing user experience.