Behavior Change, Health 2.0, and the Unmentionables

Now that a couple weeks have gone by, I thought I’d put together a quick overview of a couple of the most compelling panels of the Health 2.0 conference–the ones that actually stuck with me. One session in particular was memorable and worth revisiting.

The session was entitled Behavior Change, Health 2.0, and the Unmentionables and focused on some of the most taboo and difficult subjects in health behavior change, Obesity, Mental Health, and Sex.

Susannah Fox, of the Pew Internet Project, was the curator what of what she called the “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” panel and kicked it off with the admonition to live well, love yourself and others. She framed the conversation around some of the most taboo and difficult subjects in health behavior change, Obesity, Mental Health, and Sex. This session had five of the most compelling presenters of the entire conference.

Ron Gutman of HealthTap

Ron asked the question: “how can we engage people in health?” and went on to talk about how a focus on user experience was critical to ensuring actionable results. Games, he pointed out are successful at motivating people because of their inherent milestones, goals and measurements. “Real life doesn’t have this platform” he observed, possibly shedding some light on what HealthTap is up to.

Richard Tate of HopeLab

The HopeLab product, Zamzee is a compelling social game that encourages young people (again with rewards, notifications, and other social game mechanics) to engage in physical activity to combat childhood obesity. HopeLab’s mission is to use make health engagement fun for children in order to build positive behaviors.

Doug Solomon, CTO of IDEO

IDEO was given a communication design challenge (I forget the agency that commissioned them) to reduce unwanted pregnancy in the 18 – 29 year old population in California. Doug described their design brief as “changing behavior in the face of one of the most powerful biological urges on the planet.” bedside.org gives a glimpse of the campaign they developed.

Ramin Bastani, Founder, Qpid.me

Ramin had the best one liner: “Spreading the love, nothing else.” He demoed their (fully HIPAA compliant!) product designed to provide a secure (but sharable) registry of STD test results that a user can share with a potential sexual partner via text message in the moment when they need it most.

Alexandra Drane of Eliza

Finally, Ms. Drane pointed out some of the real-life factors (anxiety about relationships, stress, sex, money, etc.) that keep us from changing our health behaviors even when we want to. Her call to action was to provide support for all of the mental and behavioral factors not just the usual suspects, diet and exercise, if we want to achieve lasting health change.

I took away some key insights from these talks that I’ve been applying in my work in interaction design:

• milestones and measurements can be great tools to leverage to increase engagement and motivation toward a goal
• yes, we should simplify data entry and access to health information, but in order to drive action we need to offer people improved knowledge about their health situation
• we should “meet people where they are” speak in a tone of voice appropriate to the topic, in their own vernacular
• don’t forget to be human. Weed out industry jargon and use plain language.
• broaden our support for the issues that impact a person’s ability to achieve to behavior change, not just the target behaviors themselves
• don’t get distracted by the technology, focus on real human problems and how to solve them.

References

#health2con – Behavior Change Health 2.0 and the Unmentionables @susannahfox

Talk to me healthy, baby – Health 2.0 gets personal

Industry trends in prototyping

Dave Cronin of Cooper put together a nice overview of the current thinking on prototyping in interaction design, both the rationale creating them and the forms they may take.

In the broadest sense, all kinds of design artifacts are prototypes. Pencil sketches, blocks of wood, storyboards, wireframes, foam-core models, pixel-perfect state renderings, clickable demos, and functioning production code are all strategies for representing a thing being designed. However, in the world of interaction design, we usually reserve the term for ways of representing interactivity—not just the form but also behavior.

Full Article: Adobe – Developer Center

Some thoughts on Frames and Interaction Design

Michael Angeles brings my attention to David Malouf’s latest post on language and interaction design.

In “The language we use,” David Malouf discusses how ideas about user interaction can become so ingrained in what we are familiar with, that our language begins to reflect that familiarity.

It strikes me that a useful thinking tool on this topic may be the concept of Frames. I became aware of Frames, when Cognitive Psychologist George Lakoff popularized the idea in his book, Don’t Think of an Elephant. However, the idea predates his use of it by 20 years, going back to 1974 and Sociologist Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience.

A simplistic description is that a frame is the subjective definition someone may assign to a situation and as such relies on the past experiences, culture and language that person uses for interpretation. Applying this to Dave’s post, the “click” frame was being subconsciously applied by the student, based on his own past experiences with interactive technology, and this was limiting the range of imaginable solutions the student could devise to the problem.

Dave’s suggestion for how to overcome this challenge is a good one:

…you need to deconstruct your language. Write it down. Write down your narrative of your interactions and look for affinities that develop around words and phrases and see if anything calls out to you the way the word “click” called out to me.

In addition to a little critical self-analysis, I’d add a technique I learned early in my training as a designer. Try to consciously re-frame the problem at hand. It’s not a pencil, it’s an instrument for writing. It’s not a post-it, it’s a portable reminding device. It’s a simple technique but it can shake loose the subconscious frames that limit your thinking.

How to Keep Innovating

Bill Buxton on cultivating your inner learner. Great advice for designers.

1. Always be bad at something that you are passionate about.
2. You can be everything in your life—just not all at once.
3. When you get good at one skill, drop another in which you have achieved competence in order to make room for a new passion at which you are—yet again—bad.
4. Life is too short to waste on bad teachers and inefficient learning.
5. Remember: You can learn from anyone.

via: BusinessWeek