Design Behavior

Self-shaping for credit card spending

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:39:22 -0800

New article from beloved Lifehacker on self-shaping techniques to keep yourself from spending too much on credit cards. Credit cards are a double-edged sword: both very easy to spend but also very easy to shape one's spending behavior.

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A self-shaping light switch interface

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 11:44:28 -0800

I saw these at Home Depot yesterday, I thought they were pretty
clever. You have a 'default' that you can change (the # min button
stays lit) and you can hit the main button to override. Very nice.

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Self-shaping paper accepted for publication (CHI 2011 WIP)

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 19:27:01 -0800

self-shaping (CHI 2010 EA submit).pdf Download this file

Our paper on self-shaping and commitment devices was accepted as a CHI
poster in Vancouver. See attached.

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Behavior design patterns

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 11:31:52 -0800

In my lecture yesterday, I presented on 16 various forms of influence
strategies. One thing that Jeff Heer and I were discussing was the
idea of identifying behavior design patterns from looking at existing
systems. Which strategies complement one another? Which are used for
what kind of situations? This would be similar to the programming
design patterns and would require a significant set of existing
applications with tags of each strategy in use and then distilling
patterns from those.

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Guest lecture at Stanford's interaction design studio class

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:44:00 -0800

BehaviorDesign-cs247-20110208.pdf Download this file

Today I gave a guest lecture in Jeff Heer and Sep Kamvar's interaction
design studio class, cs247. The topic was behavior design. In it, we
discuss the two sides to behavior design: (1) the psychology of
influence and motivation and (2) designing behavior into the user
interaction. The slides are below. I used a lot of BJ Fogg's work as
well as influence strategies from Cialdini and several practical
examples.

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This week's reading

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 10:01:44 -0800

Andrew_PT07.pdf Download this file

This week's reading for our class on Designing Technologies for Casual Learning is embedded below. The paper feels cutting-edge when it comes to the actual suggestion tactics but dated when it comes to the review and 3 technologies used. It shows how much such tools have proliferated.

Andrew, et al, use the following suggestion tactics summarized by Fogg:

Reduction: Making a complex task simpler
Tunneling: Guided persuasion; giving control over to an expert
Tailoring Customization: providing more relevant information to individuals
Suggestion: Intervene at the right time with a compelling suggestion
Self-monitoring: Automatically tracking desired behavior
Surveillance: Observing one’s behavior publicly
Conditioning: Reinforcing target behavior

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Augmented Relaxation

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:58:00 -0800

I've been thinking for the past few months about a trend towards persuasive technologies that try to calm us down, reduce anxiety, and reduce stress. I've been referring to this emerging sub-field as "augmented relaxation". This includes apps that force you to take a break while using your computer, guiding meditation, remind us to attend yoga, or guide contemplative practices such as meditation.

I have been working on respiration in particular. "Persuasive respiration" is the phrase I've been using (but I don't love it) to describe how technology can help augment our respiratory habits. Linda Stone has referred to the problem of 'email apnea' that occurs while users use their computers. This is one instance of the problem my research aims to eliminate.

There is a lot of motivation to address the problem of the H's state in 'HCI' (human-computer interaction). Affective computing normally uses the user's affect to change the UI. In our case, the technology is interested in ensuring the user's affect is 'optimal'. Not 'happy' or 'effective' but, rather, calm/clear. Respiration is a key lever of the autonomic that controls our stress level and, indirectly, clarity of thought and, I would speculate, creativity/long-term productivity, etc.

My dissertation aims to develop the underlying principles that help ensure their users are cool, calm, and collected. I argue that this improvement in turn improves productivity, creativity, innovation, and long-term effectiveness.

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Metrics for self-shaping

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:10:00 -0800

As a cyclist, there are several ways in which individual's track their activity. This variety of metrics is present in other domains as well, but cycling provides a particularly clear array of possibilities. The first possibility is simply distance. How many miles do you ride at once, in a week, a month, or a year? This is an often used but rather superficial metric. More telling is the combination of a distance metric and a rate metric, average speed. Covering 10 miles in 30 minutes is much different than in an hour.

Two other external metrics exist and are increasingly common in cycling training. Power meters, measuring the amount of energy being put into pedaling, are popular. In addition, cadence, the number of pedal rotations per minute, is another metric, one which is often found on exercise bikes. Lance Armstrong, for instance, is famous for maintaining a cadence of 100 pedal rotations per minute, 20 higher than many of his competitors.

Personal metrics also exist, these can be subjective and objective. Objectively, measures like heart rate, maximum oxygen usage, and muscle acidity, are important, though not always easily obtained. Subjective exertion is a last common metric, and, for experts, is often the best. Lastly, subjective evaluations of cycling, such as its enjoyability, challenge, meaningfulness, and utility are also potentially relevant to goals, even cycling goals.

What metrics do you use to pursue your self-shaping goals? Are others available? Do these metrics support internalization (moving from objective metrics to a reliable subjective metric) or low-maintenance self-monitoring, so that you can seamlessly monitor progress?

Matching metrics to goals is also important. If my goal is to maintain a level of aerobic fitness, then I should use my metrics differently (maybe even use different metrics), than if I am seeking to maximize my performance in a sprint. .

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Is learning just a behavior we want to create in users?

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:15:50 -0800

This week, as part of the course I'm teaching with Dr. Goldman called
The Design of Technologies for Casual Learning, we are incorporating a
significant persuasive element to it. These are the two readings for
the week. I'll be including in the lecture notes on Cialdini's
'Influence' and Fogg's Behavior Grid.

What's interesting about this week is that we are designing learning
opportunities endogenous to the gaming experience and also using
goal-setting to create behavior change. Is learning a behavior? What
is the impact on learning technologies if we treat learning as a
behavior we want to trigger?

a40-fogg.pdf Download this file

Persuasive09-consolvoEtAl.pdf Download this file

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Couch-to-5k: A persuasive exercise iPhone app

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:41:38 -0800

http://learncasually2011.posterous.com/couch-to-5k
This app is different from many related iPhone apps, having a clear
goal in mind and targeting a specific user. The app clearly leverages
the "commitment" influence strategy. Take a look at the screenshots.
It not only reminds you to cool-down but does so at the right time.

The peer influence is not as strong: it's optional and is more like a
"show off" thing that some users might use but isn't central to the
app.

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Class on mobile persuasion for health at Northeastern this quarter

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 10:27:38 -0800

Stephen Intille's course looks very exciting and promising, he's done
some great work on ubiquitous computing for persuasive purposes.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/intille/teaching/mobilepersuasion2011syllabus.htm
Mobile Persuasion: Designing Mobile Phone Persuasive Technology for
Health and Wellness
CS7680 Topics in Computer Systems
Spring 2011

The texts are Fogg's and Cialdini's.

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Interviewed by BJ Fogg at captology.stanford.edu

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:58:47 -0800

This afternoon I was interviewed by BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford about my work on self-shaping, designing defaults, and augmented relaxation. I'm very curious to get feedback from viewers and on the hunt for a name for this sub-genre of persuasive health technologies!

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NYTimes: Why a Budget Is Like a Diet — Ineffective

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:56:00 -0800

A recent article from the NY Times on how budgets and diets rely solely on self-discipline and are ineffective for that reason. The article references the proverbial wallet project from the MIT Media Lab - a classic self-shaping device. Budgets don't take into account 'human nature' (though I'm still coming to my own conclusions about what that term means) or at least the influence of human psychology and sociocultural cues on human behavior.

The article suggests automating spending and saving and other "commitment mechanisms" (a term from economic game theory) - this has been heralded by Ramit Sethi and is a clear example of self-shaping.

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Froehlich's dissertation work at UW

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 08:15:00 -0800

Jon Froehlich is a good friend of ours. He's a PhD candidate over at the University of Washington working on the design of health-promoting technologies. Here is an entry from his blog and a quote we thought was good food for thought for our purposes:

http://sustain.cs.washington.edu/blog/index.php/2010/03/24/design-for-awarene...

"the major themes of my last two or three years of graduate school research [are] How to collect data on human behavior and render it in a provactive/actionable way that can actually change behavior and, then, how to design to maintain this user engagement over time?"

Our question is similar but not quite the same--how can we design technologies that support people to shape their own future behavior? Knowledge of their past behavior habits may not be necessary for this purpose, but it could still be a valuable component.

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We're teaching at Stanford!

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 08:14:16 -0800

There is a dearth in literature discussing how self-regulation and self-management can be learned using technologies. Most of it is instructional. We created this course to be a space for people to really engage, design technologies of their own, and produce new research. Lots of great stuff has been designed in this course in the past, including Motion Math. We're excited to see what new territory we'll explore together this time around--there could be plenty worth sharing on the blog. If you're around the Bay Area, come visit!

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Who are the "neighbors" in your virtual village (for social comparison)?

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 07:43:01 -0800

A number of new services let you compare your power consumption with that of your neighbors (see NY Times review). Sometimes you gotta buy a device, sometimes it comes on your bill (if supported by the utility itself), etc. Either way, they are leveraging a powerful concept: making visible how one 'compares' to people like me (reminds me of Cialdini's work on hotel bathroom signs). Here, we can assume that the people are like you on a dimension relevant to the metric: home size and socioeconomic status.

I'm curious if it's just seeing how you compare to "people like you", though. I think that this whole phenomenon arises from our ancient tribal, village mindset that wants to ensure, for the survival of the species, that we are contributing adequately to the tribe's well-being. We want to compare ourselves really to be sure we are pulling our weight. (Maybe.) So in this context, the 'village' comparison actually makes sense: you leave near one another!

But what about exercise and health? Would you want to see how you compare to your neighbors? Maybe - it depends if you actually have any contact with them. More likely than not, you have no idea who your neighbors are. So where is your village? It is a (hopefully diverse) network of contacts, friends, and family you are connected to via the web. But is health something you want to compare with a diverse network? Maybe but maybe not - we've heard it's more effective to compare yourself to "people like you" and I can see the truth in that.

We have metrics like the BMI but I can imagine the utility of a far more rich and robust means of identifying people similar to you (on a physical level) and using that to conduct comparisons. Once the quantified self movement moves forward, I can imagine browsing collections of thousands of persona types that you can compare yourself to in multiple dimensions.

This post started strong but kinda drifted. ;)

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How text messaging will save the world...from ourselves

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 12:22:52 -0800

That's a bombastic title to grab your attention. I'll have to expound
on this later but let's think for a minute about the asynchronous
loveliness of SMS. I love face-to-face meatspace communication as
much as the next person but let's appreciate what ubiquitous
asynchrony gives us: it gives us the ability to reflect and think
about our words and the words of others. It lets words sink in. It
can potentially save us from reactive impulses - that reactive self
that doesn't see our behavior as emerging from our previous patterns
of interaction. This can be viewed as a self-shaping story: by using
SMS intelligently, you can shape your own awareness of your own social
behaviors.

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Domain-specific self-efficacy and compartmentalized discipline

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 09:11:56 -0800

My roommate is a Ironman. He runs consistently, every day, with no
commitment devices, very fast, and for very long. But he also eats
junk food like it's nobody's business. I've heard of this phenomenon
occurring in ostensibly healthy people frequently: what my roommate
calls "compartmentalized discipline". I like it!

Bandura always described self-efficacy as domain-specific. The
question is why? I would venture to say part of the reason is that we
view discipline as being against our true nature. Our lives are so
full of 'bad' choices that the 'good' choices are the exception.
Framing life in this way means that to 'cheat a little' means eating
junk food. The word 'cheat' perpetuates a mindset that leads us
nowhere but trouble: it implies that the 'healthy' decisions are as
distasteful as taking an examination. But don't get me started on
exams. "Here's your punishment for learning a bunch of stuff. You
have to prove it."

I don't quite have the words to describe this so I'd love to hear
some. But I think of the words "framing", "mindset", and "world
view".

Now the question becomes: how can we use persuasion to help change
peoples' world views to one that doesn't result in 'cheating'? One
might be tempted to venture that actions should be viewed as neutral
(for they are) and that one only wants to make more of one type.
Blame disappears. Positive/negative actions disappears.

This is a bigger topic then I have to time to write about given that
I'm in my bathrobe right now.

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First day on Beeminder

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 08:12:42 -0800

Thanks to Danny, I've got a Beeminder account and I've started
self-tracking towards my goal of meditating at least 10min daily. I
think I'd like to change it from #times to #min, will check with him.
You can check out my progress here: http://beeminder.com/neema/om

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Commitment devices in 'Breakdown of Will'

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 13:50:05 -0800

Some juicy bits from a comment in Dan's recent post (http://messymatters.com/2010/11/15/akrasia/):

I’d refer interested readers to George Ainslie’s book, Breakdown of Will. (Your reference #9 to his website should read “picoeconomics,” not “picoenomics”). In particular, in chapter 5 he lists four ways to commit to a future choice:

-extrapsychic commitment (e.g., Cortez burning his boats),

-manipulation of attention, [this seems to confound salience with triggers]

-use of emotion, and

-“personal rules,” that is, making a resolution to change one’s behavior.

These aren’t mutually exclusive, and a person may use one mechanism to facilitate another. There’s also a discussion near the end of his book about how the overuse of these ideas can lead to rigidity and undercut spontaneity, the realization of which can make it harder to invoke the rules in the first place. The book also ties these ideas together with Herrnstein’s matching law and hyperbolic discounting, for those who care about ties to behavioral science.

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