Reflecting on behavior design

Final reflection on designing Playground for CS 247b: Design for Behavior Change

Katherine Gjertsen
3 min readMar 22, 2021

Before this class, I thought

that I could understand certain behaviors well enough to immediately begin brainstorming solutions. Our project focused on encouraging users to go outside more often. When we decided on our problem space, I thought I go outside every day, I should know how to find a solution. However, after completing an assignment measuring the number of times we did a certain behavior and I engaged with the negative behavior more times than I thought I would, it was clear that I didn’t have all the magical solutions to changing behavior. I knew that we would be conducting user studies, interviews, and usability tests, but I didn’t fully understand to what extent we would be using the feedback and information. Our team was working for many hours a week on this specific problem and I thought we would be the experts.

Over the course of the class, I

Completed user research and conducted baseline studies and interviews to create personas and a journey map of an individual's experience in the outdoors

Personas (1) and Journey Map (2)

Brainstormed and ideated tons of different ideas to encourage behavior change until we narrowed it down to a few of our favorites

Brainstorming and ideation process

Designed storyboard and wire flows to use empathy to better understand our users

User storyboard

Designed and prototyped using style tiles and a clickable prototype for usability testing

Style Tile (1) and Mockups (2)

Incorporated feedback from our usability test to create the next iteration of our prototype

Screens from our final iteration

This process taught me

that the true “experts” in the design process are the users that we are designing for. The process of interviewing, ideating, and iterating showed the power of user empathy and feedback. Something that our team thought was very intuitive was only intuitive because we spent weeks thinking about it and talking about it. Our users aren’t in our design meetings and therefore we have to create a platform that allows the user to feel like they were there for every meeting and decision. There is no one perfect formula to designing great UX. Although there are specific heuristics, the design process is incredibly collaborative and requires users to always be apart of the team.

Next time

I want to lean into user research and feedback even more. I want to continue to practice understanding a user’s needs and thinking of ways to incorporate them into the current product. My favorite thing about UX design is the dynamic and collaborative process and I am excited to use these methods in future projects.

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