Telecommuting, drinking games, and other interventions
Designing and deploying a behavioral intervention study for water intake.
Before designing our intervention study this week, we looked back to our affinity maps to tease out our key learnings and findings which also informed our persona and journey map development. Note to the teaching team: you can take a look at our affinity map work on our password-protected Miro here!
Affinity unpacking and system mapping 🗒
From our 12 interviews and corresponding diary studies, we had two key takeaways:
- People share are a few common tactics to measure water consumption.💧 Usually, people relied on bodily cues (like energy or pee color) or routines (like meals or classes). More interestingly, there seems to be a misalignment between what is natural or habitual and the standard approach to reform, specifically in terms of goal-setting and tracking success.
- When people attempt to reform, there seems to be a lot of motivation, but very little strategy for execution. 🥵 Many participants who self-identified as dehydrated recognized themselves they needed to drink more and recognized key ways their lives could improve if they drank more water, but oftentimes go too far too fast, resulting in a disruption to their lifestyle that puts them off from lasting reform.
The second insight is a common plight for routiners, a proto-persona we identified based on their penchant for drinking with meals or other relatively infrequent habits. To help us better understand their journey and to surface possible effective interventions, we created the following system map:
The highlighted loop in blue relates five key aspects of routiners that we found essential to address with a designed intervention. Namely, routiners relied on physical body cues to inform them of their hydration status but rarely use them to actually drink water; instead, they pick infrequent anchors (such as meals) that result in dehydration. Bottle usage is infrequent among routiners, finding them inconvenient while at home. Goal-setting even in a daily sense doesn’t work with routiners, who are so stuck in the cycle that they don’t realize their dehydration until late in the evening when it’s unlikely they’ll catch up comfortably. 🤒
Above all, the system map demonstrated that whatever intervention and solution we designed, we needed to break this relational loop to ensure more long-lasting reform.
We need to have an intervention 👀
From this system map, we did a few rounds of brainstorming over Miro (again, you can find our results here!), with ideas ranging from passive aggressive accountability to location-based reminders; however, we ultimately settled on an intervention that felt perfect for the panorama. 🦠
Think of it as a Zoom drinking game. Our intervention was to work with participants to come up with anchors that reminded them to drink water. We chose to focus on Zoom-related triggers because of the relevance of Zoom in our participants’ daily lives, being mainly upperclassmen in college.
We ultimately settled on this intervention study because our most prioritized persona of semi-hydrated routiners suffered greatly from having too few triggers to prompt water drinking. This proto-persona would frequently forget to drink water outside of these prompts, so we hypothesized that we could increase their hydration by adding more triggers to their daily routine as a reminder to drink. ✅
Below is the prompt we gave them inside their personal tracker, done in Google Docs:
Hey there! Thanks again for participating in our intervention. We'll be conducting the same water diary recording procedure that you used last time. However, we're adding one new wrinkle: every time you either open a video call app to join a call or hear a phrase during that Zoom call, drink a bit of water.With regards to the phrases you hear, you'll have a choice of three to watch out for! Pick ones you think you'll hear relatively frequently in a Zoom call. Example phrases include: "I think you're on mute!" "Can you hear me?" "Unprecedented times…" and so on. Consider adding in any work or friend-specific phrases (i.e. OKR, launch, friends' names).Your point of contact will text you daily as a general reminder of the intervention.(And yes, this is taking inspiration from drinking games, but shhh… 🤫)
We hoped this would be successful because we weren’t asking them to change the anchors they already used (namely, meals!); instead, we wanted to augment and add onto them. We also note that for some participants who didn’t use Zoom frequently, we worked with them to identify alternative anchors and cues.
And the results are (mostly) in 😳
This time around, we managed to nab 10 of our original 12 participants, though by the study’s end only 7 managed to complete the intervention in time for this report. A number of factors can explain this resulting drop in retention, including midterm szn, a lack of desire to track 5 more days, and the long weekend. ☀️ This last factor in particular also affected the effectiveness of our intervention, because our users likely only had Zoom classes during the weekday, which comprised only 2 of 5 days in the study.
Overall, we got a mixed bag of results from our intervention, which in hindsight could have been expected. Below is a chart summarizing the results from users who either completed the study or partially completed it (marked by a lighter shade of blue). We’re still in the process of finishing up a few participants, so hopefully they’ll further affirm the results we found from this set of 7.
Key findings 🔑
First, some of the successes! Overall, it seemed like the level of success related to this intervention depended on the types of frequent anchors chosen. One participant reported that her anchor of yawning unintentionally helped her drink more water at night time, which was a period of time she needed to drink water more previously. Although she thought this anchor would help her drink water during long work meetings over Zoom, the time of day proved to be a more important factor in the reminder.
Finding bodily cues (other than feeling dehydrated) and anchoring them to drinking water can be a more permanent solution to this issue. (Another participant reported that she drank more water after finding a pimple, so maybe there’s some weight here in this psychological shift in focus.) 🧐
Among other common patterns we found from our participants, a few reported that they did not follow the water cues exactly because they proved to be too numerous. Nevertheless, they did report that their water intake increased substantially, to the point where they felt over-hydrated and inconvenienced by how often she had to go to the restroom. One participant mentioned:
I’d feel guilty for missing cues to drink, so I’d drink more afterwards to make up for it.
This participant in particular was still reminded to drink by the nagging pressure of the cues, even if she didn’t respond to each individual cue, which isn’t necessarily great for positive reinforcement. ⚠️
Next steps 👣
Moving forward, we hope to develop a solution that takes into account a frequent (but not too frequent) system of anchors that apply light pressure for participants to stay hydrated. We think there’s great promise in adapting and expanding Fogg’s anchor concept through a systematic framework that works at least during this Panda Express. 🦠
And perhaps that’s all we need for an effective solution—as many interviewees noted, the pandemic is a consistent extenuating factor in what is otherwise their active daily routines. Finding an effective stopgap solution that works in this stay-at-home telecommuting world may be enough to let users coast by until the world restarts again.
