Mock-up for Anchor (illustrations from the Figma community).

Bon voyage: a short & sweet final reflection on behavior design

Some reflections on designing Anchor for CS 247B: Design for Behavior Change.

I had a rather narrow view of behavior design prior to taking this class; in the grand scheme of UX research, I thought of behavior design as a book in a large library that includes designing for accessibility, visual design, and other “types.” When I needed to think about behavior design, I could pull out that book and pull concepts from it like I’m in a pseudo-vacuum. (Or perhaps I didn’t really think of design in this way, but as a misguided heuristic it was nice to like that; it would certainly make things easier for me! 😂)

Journey map I created for a Routiner persona.

Of course, this is a really reductive view of designing for humans; I quickly realized that behavior design is embedded in nearly every system we interact with, physical, virtual, and everything in between. Websites and apps demand our attention, appliances and tools suggest affordances and disaffordances, and all of this is in concert with other considerations like graphic design and design ethics.

Storyboard I sketched out for prototype usage (inspired by lecture slides).

As a result, behavior design and behavior change isn’t something that can be understood like reading a standards manual and following things to a T. Humans are complicated, and so designing to change human behavior is complicated too. “If A, then B” may be a simplified view of behavior design, but B can lead to changes in C and D and E, which can in turn even change A.

Brainstorming stills (left) and sketched out ideas (right).

After going through the process of designing a behavior intervention, from recruiting and diary studies to interventions and usability testing, I feel more confident in my toolkit — I may not have added anything particularly new to this toolkit, per se (though I really appreciated the ethics discussions that were grounded in philosophy, they mirrored my curriculum in CS 182 really well!), but I can be sure that whatever my next project may be I’ll have a deeper understanding of what I can do to surface user insights and synthesize them in an actionable way.

Wireflow for in-meeting experience (left) and UI style guide for solution (right).

To the teaching team, thanks for a great quarter! ❤️

Select screens of onboarding.