UK Personal Debt: From Misery to Happiness
Mr Micawber delivers some valedictory remarks - courtesy of http://charlesdickenspage.com/
A week ago, the Bank of England reported that personal debt fell during July for the first time since records began (1993): people paid back more than they borrowed. Without picking sides in the debate running through the comments on Stephanie Flanders’ blog post on the subject, being able to live with less debt generally seems like a Good Thing to an economic muggins like me. As Mr Micawber said…
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
…et cetera, et cetra. Spending and money management is a behaviour I haven’t thought too deeply about, but there are a few interesting instances of design that encourage particular money-related behaviours that immediately spring to mind.
A while ago when working on a university project on Personal Carbon Trading (a parallel currency of carbon credits often described as another card that people would carry in their wallets) I wondered whether incorporating a display that indicated how many credits remained on the card would be a good idea. Something like e-paper could work well; it’s flat and consumes little power. Leaving aside the privacy issues and risks associated with displaying account balances on cards for everyone to see, a display on the card would give people some feedback (or self-monitoring) on their balance and could help them manage their account more effectively. Perhaps it could even take the idea of being in the red or the black literally and change colour according to the balance of your account.
Adding feedback to cards isn’t a new idea. You probably remember BT’s earlier phonecards, which had a strip which was marked each time the card was used. Here’s one (it just happens to be prisons issue phonecard) that looks from the marks like it’s been half-used:
Phonecard by Flickr user everydaylifemodern
Another interesting example of design for behaviour change to help money management is given by Dan Lockton in his Design with Intent toolkit. Yahoo’s loan simulator provides people with the ability to project their loan repayments into the future (it doesn’t seem to work on Internet Explorer 6 by the way):
Yahoo's loan simulator
It’s a helpful utility I think, but does it give the simulation in the right place? Maybe a loan simulator on a mobile phone be a better influence when you’re out spending money? Would it be better if you could plot other big expenses you’re expecting in the next few years?
Do you know of any other good examples of design, behaviour, and money management out there?
Dork’s Diary
Jamie's Diet Diary
Just because I like to embarrass myself, I thought I’d do a quick post to let you know that I’m keeping a diet diary this week – I’m a bit bashful about it.
I’m doing it partly out of interest, and partly as a mini-prototype of what it might be like to use a persuasive mobile-phone based diet diary – an idea that Stephen and I talked about in the comments of this post.
It has been a bit of an eye opener so far. My guideline daily amount of kilo-calories is 2500, but yesterday I’d already gobbled up over 4000 by the time I got home from work. By the end of the day I’d eaten 5308 kcal (two day’s worth!) [Actually the real eye-opener is that I obviously can't tell the difference between kilojoules and kilocalories - I only had 1808kcal yesterday, 692 too few...]. I’ll do a more detailed breakdown of results at the end of the week…
The benefit of a mobile phone application to help me keep track of my diet is that it could reduce the risk of (accidentally) under-reporting what I eat – either by forgetting to enter something in, or by losing track of what else I’ve eaten that day. My mobile is almost always in my pocket, so it could be a good platform for designing something a bit more engaging than my paper prototype.
Allowing me to self-monitor by giving me feedback and a target is one thing – it enables me to monitor my diet, but what’s the next step? How could a mobile phone app encourage me to change my diet? Should it make suggestions by recommending me what to eat to keep to my personal target, should it use surveillance (or social proofing) to make my diet visible to my friends and vice versa? How could it encourage healthy eating rather than extreme dieting?
Here’s a relevant statistic for these cost-cutting times: “The NHS costs attributable to overweight and obesity are projected to double to £10 billion per year by 2050. The wider costs to society and business are estimated to reach £49.9 billion per year (at today’s prices).” said Foresight, in their recent Tackling Obesities: Future Choices project.
10 Things You Need to Know About Losing Weight…
…was a very watchable hour long programme on BBC One on Wednesday last week. I’m pretty thin, and consequently don’t know my Atkins diet from my zone diet (I even had to look up the name of another diet to write that sentence), but really enjoyed this programme.
It followed the progress of a medical-doctor-slash-telly-presenter with some “hidden fat” problems (which even gives thin people something to worry about) who was cynical about dieting and wanted a really scientific approach. Cue MRI and fMRI scans, behavioural economics, urine samples and heart rate monitors.
There was lots of food for thought from a design for behaviour change point of view, but what I was most interested in was the way they used to measure the amount of calories someone eats in a day.
One of their volunteers was a woman with a healthy diet and an active lifestyle, but who was also a bit overweight. They asked her to keep a food diary for nine days, using a combination of keeping a video diary and a written diary. As well as recording what she ate through the diaries, she also drank a glass of doubly labeled water every morning, and took urine samples every evening. From some magical process, nutritionists were able to measure how many calories she burned that day and how many she had eaten. On a typical day, she recorded that she ate 1100 calories, but the test showed that the number was actually closer to 3000. Apparently most people under-report by about 50%.
I didn’t know you could measure calory intake like that – and I think it’s got great potential. If most people think they are eating 50% fewer calories than they are, then we’re clearly not very good at keeping track of our intake. So if I could drink some special water every morning (maybe supplied in a Yakult-type package?) and use an electronic reader (maybe like a pregnancy tester?) to measure the calories I was taking in – I’d be a lot better informed, and a lot more engaged in my diet.
The calories you eat are normally invisible – packaging the doubly labeled water test into something people could do on their own – would make them meausurable and a closer step to being controllable. “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so” as Galileo Galilei said in my quotation of the moment.
Charm Offensive
Just a quick post to note that Kingston University, the University of the West of England and Swansea University are collaborating on a three year project (CHARM) to explore the effect on people’s behaviour of giving them feedback (what B J Fogg calls “self-monitoring” in Persuasive Technology). Mixing sociology, social psychology and behavioural economics, the project will run three case studies that show the effect of feedback on people’s electricity consumption, their health, and something rather more nebulously based around Facebook.
More details on CHARM here.
It will be great to have some more rigorous academic research in this area.
The project at the RSA that this blog accompanies, by the way, is intending to look at the way in which we can apply Persuasive Technology (including feedback/self-monitoring) to encourage behaviours related to the environment, health, and (again more nebulously) civic participation.
- update -
Details of the EPSRC grant behind CHARM are here with a bit more info.
Example #4 – Infant Simulators
What must be fed, burped, rocked and have its nappy changed around the clock… and “comes in seven different head styles”? The answer to this rather grisly juxtaposition is the RealCare Baby; a sophisticated infant simulator designed to help teenagers understand the difficult reality of looking after a baby.
RealCare Baby looks like a real baby, must be constantly cared for (fed, burped, rocked, changed), needs its head supported properly, only responds to care from particular people (by dint of a wireless wristband worn by the “parent”) and records detailed data on how that parent looked after it. The data includes, by the way, whether and at what times the baby was fed, burped, rocked and changed, whether it was shaken, held roughly or the wrong way and whether its head was supported or not.
RealCare Baby is pretty obviously persuasive technology, as it explicitly attempts to change people’s attitudes (and by extension, behaviour) about having a child. B. J. Fogg describes it as “perhaps the best known object simulator used for persuasive purposes” [1]. Object simulations (as opposed to environment simulations which allow people to try things out in virtual worlds) use a physical object in the real world to allow experimentation. In this case it allows teenagers to simulate the experience of being a parent in the real world; this makes the experience far more lifelike than being asked to simply imagine having a child or using an inanimate stand in (like a bag of flour) – suddenly a hungry, crying, pooing baby is introduced to a teenager’s social life.
So how effective are they? A review paper (by the manufacturer) collates twenty studies between 1997 and 2006 on the effectiveness of infant simulators, and cites studies (mostly from the US) that show:
- Recognition of the intensity of parenthood (e.g. [3] – 94.3% of 353 male and female 9th graders resulted in responses like looking after a baby might be “too much for them [as an adolescent parent] to handle”)
- Recognition that parenting would limit their social life (e.g. [4] – 250 male and female 11th graders “nearly every student (98 percent) said that having a baby would limit their social life”
- Understanding that having a child would limit future goals (e.g. [5] – 213 male and female 10th to 12th graders most commonly thought “that being a parent is time-consuming and a lot of responsibility and that being a teen parent will keep you from meeting future goals.”)
- Understanding that planning for parenthood is important (e.g. [6] – 379 male and female 8th and 10th graders “76 percent [of the students] agreed that Baby Think It Over [a forerunner of the RealCare Baby] helped them decide to wait to have children.”
And if you’re interested and live in Brighton, you can borrow one from the Health Promotion Library there.
[1] Fogg, B. J., (2003) Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann.
[2] Realityworks, Inc. The Effectiveness of Infant Simulators in Teen Sexuality & Parenting Programs.
[3] de Anda, D. (2006). Baby Think It Over: Evaluation of an infant simulation intervention for adolescent pregnancy prevention. Health and Social Work, 31(1), 26-35.
[4] Didion, J., and Gatzke, H. (2004). The Baby Think It Over experience to prevent teen pregnancy: A postintervention evaluation. Public Health Nursing, 21(4), 331-337.
[5] Somers, C. L., and Fahlman, M. M. (2001). Effectiveness of the “Baby Think It Over” teen pregnancy prevention program. Journal of School Health, 71(5), 188-197.
[6] Barnett, J. E., and Hurst, C. S. (2004). Do adolescents take “Baby Think It Over” seriously? Adolescence, 39(153), 65-76.
Confession is Good for the Soul
Not doing very well am I? 6.03km down, 67.97km to go. As my Nike+ training plan cheerily reminds me, with the end date of my training plan on the 31st January, that puts me currently 63km behind. And it all started so well.
I’ve really enjoyed the Nike+iPod experience though. Running with music is great (still trying to decide what my “power tune” should be), the kilometre countdowns in your ear are genuinely encouraging, the half way point (again spoken through your earphones) is handy – if like me you run in a straight line and then back again – and I did find myself that little bit more encouraged when I’d broken a personal best (admittedly easy when you’re just starting out). The only thing that’s really annoying is when you go for a run after midnight, then upload your data to the Nike+ website but it doesn’t count towards your training plan because it falls on the next day…
But I can’t use that excuse for a deficit of 63km. The reason for that is that I’ve been recovering from a bit of flu with a particularly long tail. But now I’m suddenly, wonderfully, better.
So I can either run 17km tonight, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Or I can give myself another month.
By the way, if you use Nike+, do join the team of which I am labelled “coach”, but am actually floundering second from bottom of the leaderboard.
Example #2 – Real Time Energy Displays
Energy consumption in the home is invisible, which becomes a social problem when it accounts for 27% of the UK’s CO2 emissions. Part of the problem is that it takes a certain type of person to find beauty in a traditional electricity meter, and they are usually hidden away; installed inside cupboards or above eye level and never looked at.
Enter a broad range of persuasive products; some simple, some sleek, some designer and some made by the so-called iPod of Cleantech, that all try to reduce consumption by making energy visible. The majority of these products rely on a current sensor that clips around the main electricity inlet to a house (although this press release suggests that some may be more sophisticated) and wirelessly transmits the energy data to a portable and hopefully beautiful object that sits on your coffee table and constantly displays it.
How do these real time energy displays (as they have become known) attempt to persuade people to reduce energy consumption? All of them employ self-monitoring (in a similar way to Nike+iPod) to help people become more attuned to how much each of their appliances are consuming and are enabled to make intelligent decisions. Mention of “reward points” suggests some of them employ aspects of tunnelling, like an energy coach might. The more advanced real time energy displays have also seen the potential of the internet, and use (or are planning to use) social networking to create communities around energy consumption, adding surveillance to the list of persuasive techniques. Lastly, real time energy displays function as simulated cause and effect scenarios, allowing people to turn on and off appliances, and see from the display how much CO2 would be emitted each year if they continued to consume energy at such a rate (it is a personal disappointment that none of them are yet hooked up to a climate change model that shows how this would correspond to sea level rise or ecosystem shift… if anyone knows of a climate change model with an API – do let me know).
Real time energy displays are one of the highest profile of products that could be considered persuasive technology, after they had a brief brush with environmental policy in the government’s draft energy bill of 2007, which required energy suppliers to provide such displays to those customers that requested them (as a precursor to a roll-out of smart meters, which are a slightly different kettle of fish). The government engaged suppliers, consumers and OFGEM in consultation and carried out a cost benefit analysis and impact assessment which concluded that given the evidence for such products, the policy would not be cost effective. The requirement was dropped from the bill, illustrating the requirement for robust and quantitative evidence for the effectiveness of such persuasive technology, and also the difficulty of comparing the effectiveness of different displays when effectiveness hangs on the interaction design (and the persuasive power).
So what evidence is there? Studies are thin on the ground and spread over many years (dating back to the oil crisis of the 70s) when interaction design was less advanced, but the most credible review of the literature suggests savings of 5-15% can be obtained by giving people direct feedback of energy consumption. Further tests of real time displays are currently under way (some in conjunction with smart-meter trials) in 8,500 households in the UK and more across the world. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the savings may be even higher; approaching 40%.
However the real time energy display story ends, they may prove to be a landmark case for persuasive technology and behaviour change.
By the way, in addition to making energy visible via real time energy displays, there are also an abundance of conceptual products from the Interactive Institute that are well worth a look.
Example #1 – Nike+iPod
This post has been updated with more info regarding the need for expensive running shoes – see note at the bottom…
My Nike+iPod
Do you exercise enough? What could encourage you to do it more regularly? Nike+iPod might help. It’s a brilliantly-conceived product/service from two colossal design-led brands. It hooks on to existing behaviour and clever technology to make the user experience as natural as possible, leverages the people-power of the web, and uses several persuasive techniques to encourage people to just do it a little bit more seriously.
The product side of Nike+iPod comprises a sensor that slides into the cavity under the insole of your Nike+ running shoe and an add-on for your iPod. The sensor is an accelerometer (the components that make Nintendo Wii remote controllers work) that senses the motion of your feet. Pulses that correspond to your movement are transmitted over a short-range wireless link to the iPod add-on, which logs the pulses and aggregates them to form data about your run.
The product is only half the Nike+iPod story though. Nike have used the web in a similar way to the makers of internet enabled games consoles to form a massive competitive community website. Once you’ve recovered from your run and had a look at your data, you can upload it to the Nike+ website to see how you compare with people all over the world. You can challenge them to compete with you too if you’re feeling combative, or just check out what the top running power tune is – can you guess what it is?
Of course the main behaviour that Nike+iPod encourages is the purchase of expensive running shoes (the cheaper Nike trainers don’t have the sensor cavity), but how does it do at persuading people to run more? Let’s look at which of B. J. Fogg’s persuasive techniques it uses.
The most obvious technique employed by Nike+iPod is self monitoring (simply allowing people to monitor their behaviour by making that information available to them); the training logs that build up over the weeks let you see how you are improving. During your run, self monitoring on a smaller scale is also given by a voice in your earphones that counts off the miles. Operant conditioning (rewarding the right behaviour – disappointingly there are no punishments for walking) is also used; at the end of your run you get a message of congratulations from Lance Armstrong, Paula Radcliffe or other authoritative athlete (Nike+iPod acting in a social role to persuade). That may sound naff, but from the few times I’ve been persuaded into running by an enthusiastic friend, I would take kind words from anyone – man or machine – during the post-run collapse-on-the-floor period.
The idea of tunnelling (submitting yourself to a difficult process, analogous to someone checking themselves into rehab) is also drawn on; the Nike+ website lets you choose a training program for your running and set goals or undertake challenges. Also, an aspect of surveillance is used; the social network side of the Nike+ website allows you to compare your stats with other runners (and other people to see your stats), or challenge your friends to beat your time.
Do these techniques actually work? I’m going to suggest a simple experiment. I’ve occasionally thought it would be good to get less chronically unfit, but although I’ve been for the odd scamper, it’s never become regular enough behaviour to do any good. Over the weekend I bought a Nike+iPod kit which I’m going to start using. I’m not pretending it’s robustly scientific, but during the next month or so I’ll let you know whether using Nike+iPod helps me make go running more regularly.
If anyone wants to join me (”share the motivation, multiply the performance” as the website says), I’ve started a team on the Nike+ website. Sign up or leave a comment if you want to play (you can still play even if your trainers don’t have the Nike+ cavity with one of these things – see update below).
Update – Monday 8th December at 14:00
A couple of people have asked about the expensive shoes issue – although Nike would like you to buy these, third parties are offering kits that let you clip your Nike+ sensor to your existing shoes. Although I linked to Runaway above, after a bit more research, the best of the bunch seem to be Marware’s Sportsuit. Buy it from Amazon here.
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