Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

Background

This app was developed based on original features from the original Edit service proposition. While the original Edit proposition explores a holistic approach to building healthier habits over time, the Edit app is a live test of smaller features conceptualised earlier.

In the original Edit proposition, there was an underlying idea of helping people build new and purposeful rituals while tracking the effect of those new rituals to help shift their behavior. These were what we referred to as ‘edits’. This live app is a simple test of the impact of ritual design on behavior change. While we proved the impact of ritual design through high-touch prototypes, it was essential to test this mechanism’s validity for change when left up to people’s daily whims.

The Edit app, in its current form, simply curates a list of ‘edits’ for people to try when craving a cigarette. Each individual can try different edits and indicate when they do it and how well it works. As users find edits that work for them, they can add them to their daily routine and effectively create rituals that help cope with different cravings that arise throughout the day.

Experiments

Our initial experiments and prototypes focused on explicitly testing the concept of ritual design and its impact on changing behavior. We engaged two users over two weeks using a combination of other tools (such as WhatsApp) to create the effect of a service that allows you to form new rituals to reduce cigarette intake. By mimicking a chatbot that helped users form new daily rituals and track the impact, we were able to reduce the amount each user smoked by 63-84%.

While the above experiments proved successful, we were very aware of the impact of another person acting as the chatbot. Ultimately, there is a variable around accountability that wouldn’t play as much of a factor in a purely digital-driven solution. With that in mind, we created the Edit App to test the impact of ritual design on new habit formation in a less controlled environment.

The Edit App allows users to freely plan and design daily rituals, similar to the ones we suggested in our manual experiments. While a chatbot wasn’t developed due to cost and time, we did pull through all the possible “edits” that we curated in the manual experiments.

Find out how we ‘Updated the strategic questions’ to define the design research strategy.

What is Edit?

With the ability to track the cigarettes you smoke and over 75 curated replacement activities, you’ll have the tools you need to build new routines that don’t involve smoking. Edit takes proven approaches for developing healthier habits and makes them simple to do with an app that smoothly fits into your daily life.

Track your progress

Edit makes tracking cigarettes easy so you can see your progress over time and start to make positive changes in your habits. Tracking every time you have a cigarette or vape is a proven method for reducing how much you smoke.

Try new things

What can you do instead of smoking? Edit suggests positive actions for you to try instead of smoking cigarettes. With over 100 suggestions in “Your Stack” you’ll have plenty of new things to try.

Build a New Routine

Once you start to figure out what works for you, you can set reminders that will help you slowly build a routine that has less cigarettes in it. Reducing how much you smoke requires you to make small changes to your daily routine so you can edit out cigarettes.

What we’ve learnt

Engagement is a barrier

While the mechanism of designing new rituals for one’s self is valuable for changing behavior, how you engage an individual with that process is critical to the success of the service. When left with a curated list of possible new rituals to form and some basic tracking features, users didn’t remain engaged over a long enough period to see a change in behavior.

Incentive drives engagement

While this is not novel learning for anyone in the digital services world, it is worth restating. When we analysed the Edit App’s different features that were restricting engagement, we realised that there were not enough variable rewards for using the app. It relied far too heavily on a user’s self-motivation to reduce their daily cigarette intake. This is a clear design challenge for the future of the app.

Usage context is critical

One of the main differences between our manual experiments (which were very successful) and the Edit App is the ability to provide context to the user. When manually interacting with users through a fake chatbot, we were able to explain why a particular new ritual would impact their smoking habit. There was no such context with the Edit App, perhaps leaving users feeling lost.

Track the Right Thing

The Edit App promotes the tracking of smoked cigarettes so users can see their progress over time, which is a worthy feature in theory. In reality, we found users would much prefer to track their cravings through the app and immediately have curated replacement activities to help fight those cravings.

Emerging discussions

How much control? And control over what?

Perhaps the most interesting discussion to come out of all of the Edit work is the idea of agency, and over what people actually want agency.We set out on this journey with the underlying goal of giving people agency over their behaviour and, in turn, agency over their wellbeing.

What we believe today is different than when we started. It’s worth exploring whether people actually want total control over their health or if they just want to benefit from what comes with being healthier. Does a smoker honestly want complete agency over their quitting journey, or do they want a third party (such as Edit) to force them to quit, so they can get on with their life free from the controlling addiction? This brings up the question of the role of technology in helping people to increase their overall wellbeing, which unfortunately is a highly complex system.

For example, does a smoker want technology to take over the responsibility of quitting so that they can have complete agency over their fitness routine, something that was once controlled and constrained by their smoking addiction?

We believe it’s far too assumptive and generic to design things to give complete agency. The reality is that total agency over everything that has to do with your wellbeing can increase stress rather than reduce it. Finding the balance between user control and technology control continues to be the struggle we face as services get smarter, and humans get more demanding.

Team

David Freemeyer
Rhea Belani

Other services developed

Live Services

Hold

Hold is an app that gives people the personal space to let out whatever is on their mind and relax knowing that it is stored safely. It helps people give structure to their internal dialogue making self reflection become more effective.

Live Services

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Phase 4

Deliver Live Services

Emergent solutions brought to the market

An overview of our design approach

The efforts of the previous phase centred on assessing the user, and value hypothesis of the propositions through testing with the market.

This work also provided the space for the organisation to evaluate the implications of the propositions and engage in new ethical discussions about the role of the organisation.

All these factors combined with a careful strategic assessment, resulted in the appropriate selection of engaging and relevant concepts to take forward to this final phase.

The task of this phase is to convert the concepts into live services that can operate as ‘minimum viable’ versions of their future potential, (meaning a service that functions just enough to meaningfully trial the value proposition).

In doing so, the lab connects real functioning services to real people in the market, assessing in an uncontrolled environment how users would engage, What they would find valuable and most critically for this final stage — what impact the services could have.

This stage, therefore, shows whether the value propositions can be converted into live services that are not just engaging, but also effective in delivering agency, happiness or health outcomes.

The theory

However, there was less complexity in terms of managing what is provocative or futuristic. At this point, the concepts to be tested and developed were already backcast to a tangible and unprovocative state for most users.

This final phase uses similar practical methodologies as the previous one. This innovation process is also about the testing and development of concepts to rapidly deliver them and it is largely tied to the lean development methodology.

Therefore, the methodology applied here was to build, measure and learn.

Formulate hypotheses or assumptions based on the previous stage and build MVPs as experiments that could challenge these assumptions.
Measure the outcomes of the experiment, collecting data and observations.
Synthesise learnings from the collected data to build knowledge, inform the overall concept and reformulate hypotheses to be tested in another cycle.

As with the previous stages the assumptions to be tested were of varying kinds.The three main categories were:

the user hypothesis (the target user segment appropriate);
the problem hypothesis (the problem identified is worth addressing); and,
the value hypothesis (the solution for tackling the problem is engaging and effective).

These were all tested to a degree in the previous round, but here the user hypothesis and problem hypothesis can be more robustly challenged with the existence of functional prototypes and the value hypothesis can be more legitimately divided and assessed in terms of its effectiveness or impact and how engaging it is for users. In other words, this stage not only asks ‘do the users want it?’, but also, ‘Does it work for them?’. This level of exploration can only be conducted once you are able to prototype a user experience that can be used, rather than when it’s simply a proposition of a service.

The process

In this phase, the two units refer to two different organisational structures or vehicles for the development of live services. Unit 1 refers to work done in-house, and Unit 2 refers to work done through Innovation RCA (The RCA’s startup incubation centre). Broadly, both processes have the same objectives of going from developed value propositions into live services, but their initial steps vary.

For the in-house unit of work, the initial stages are about aligning the project with the clients organisational strategy and reframing the value proposition and hypotheses to get the most valuable placement of the service and the most meaningful research outcomes.

For the Innovation RCA unit, the initial stages are about the mechanics of forming a legal entity, setting up shareholder agreements and managing intellectual property etc.

Once these initial stages are worked through, both organisational options operate in a similar process of creating MVPs or prototypes that enable them to experiment with the market in some way, so as to prove or disprove their hypotheses. Based on these experiments they can interpret results, decipher new learnings and proceed in an increasingly less risky direction.

This process eventually leads to larger investments in the development of a product that can operate as an autonomous service in a live marketplace. The results of which enable the client and both types of organisational structure to robustly understand the value and the impact of the services they are developing, and can thus move forward decisively.

The direct application of this methodology

Services

Live Services

Real, emergent services responsive to the future

Phase 4: Deliver Live Services

Choose a unit to explore

Unit 1: Developing Services In-House

Transforming the value propositions of the previous work package into live services to test their commercialisation in the market and their strategic value beyond monetisation.

Unit 2: Incubating in InnovationRCA

Turning a service concept into a functioning service that can exist in a live marketplace in a way that it can de-risk investment by incubating at InnovationRCA, the Royal College of Art’s centre for entrepreneurship and commercialisation.

Live Services

Hold

Live Services

Edit

Edit is an app that helps you fill your daily routine with more positive actions than smoking. It’s not about quitting cold turkey or feeling like a patient. It’s just about trying new things and seeing if they work for you and your lifestyle.

Live Services

Quirk

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests, so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Download

Google Play

App Store

What is the problem?

T his service evolved from research on the ‘Spark’ design proposition where the team explored how best to customise financial services to people’s personalities. Spark helped people discover their money personality and then offered tailored insights and tips to align their spending with their personality, and easier access to financial services based on a financial wellbeing score dependent on the user’s behaviour. The proposition ‘Spark’, demonstrated clear demand and user engagement, but raised questions about how vulnerable these systems may be to bias (against particular personalities), with users gaming the system or faking their behaviour to improve their financial wellbeing score.

Quirk is the next evolution of Spark- The team set out to launch Quirk to the market and had to take a more refined approach, which wouldn’t expose customers to Spark’s vulnerabilities. Quirk adapted its focus from “wellbeing and happiness” to “financial health” because most people still struggle to manage money. In the UK, 40% of people don’t have savings, 44% of 16-24 year olds have dipped into their overdraft in the past year, and 84% of adults feel they aren’t financially literate after leaving high school. With this statistical backdrop, the team found that financial services get better engagement from users when the focus is on building financial literacy and improving financial health (saving more/getting out of debt) rather than about how much happiness can be gained through optimising spending to your personality.

Additionally, the team found that startups generally have to start their life by focusing on one achievable feature that users need and expand the offering later, once the user base has grown. In this instance, as financial services are highly regulated, it was more appropriate to focus on financial literacy and build a product that focused on personal finance management. Particularly because financial wellbeing starts with financial literacy, this would lend itself well to expanding into other features later.

Find out how we ‘Updated the strategic questions’ to define the design research strategy.

Early Testing and Development

Over the course of this prototyping and development round, the team developed multiple prototypes of many different forms to understand how people engage with the concept, how the experience of the service should be structured and how it could be branded. They also worked with psychologists to develop a more robust personality test that would help identify personality types.

One of the first things that was established was that the initial ambition of ‘Spark’ was not achievable because there was no ‘go-to-market’ strategy. Therefore, it was imperative for the product to be based on the most useful feature that can be built rapidly and then expanded on later.

The team developed clickable prototypes that were used by research participants to model an ideal service experience. Through this process, they tested a feature that connects multiple bank accounts to the app to give users an overview of their finances. Testing showed that people liked the feature, but were uneasy about going through a bank lining process that seemed like quite a significant data-sharing commitment before really understanding the value of the app. Through an iterative development process, the team arranged the onboarding experience so that users first took the personality test (which most people get value from) and then had a brief guided tour experience in the app before being asked to connect up their bank accounts.

Additionally, the team tested the service messaging and adverts and found that a fine balance had to be struck between highlighting the feature of connecting your bank accounts and getting an overview of finances, without seeming too much like a bank. It was important to differentiate Quirk from a bank as it would raise users’ expectations of features and also cause friction in getting them onboarded with Quirk.

Quirk has developed its own proprietary test based on an academic study that uses the established personality frameworks to assess money attitudes and financial behaviour. People complete a quiz about their personality and money habits, which matches them with one of four personas: The Blissful, The Artist, The Optimiser and The Explorer, each of which have inherent traits and relationships with money that already help the user understand their own behaviour better. This assessment then helps tailor the rest of the service to the user’s personality type. Money doesn’t equal happiness, but when people spend their money according to their personality, it can lead to more happiness.

Track your spending across accounts

Quirk helps you connect all your accounts from multiple providers into the service so that you can get a comprehensive overview of all your finances. It allows you to set up a spending plan, so you can track your discretionary spending according to different merchants, categories, or tracking your recurring payments in one place.

Tailored insights

Quirk identifies key behavioural traits and money attitudes as well as assesses a user’s financial situation to better tailor their recommendations. This can vary from simplifying the user experience and language, to providing relevant educational content or providing tips and recommendations for different financial products. Quirk also provides data insights that help users better understand where their money is going and if they are hitting their budget and saving goals over time.

The science behind it

To better understand the drivers of what influences financial wellbeing, we found some interesting academic literature. The first widespread research study on money and happiness came from Dan Kahneman and Angus Deaton, Nobel winning economists who first discussed a ‘satiation point’ —the point at which greater household income is not associated with greater happiness. That number was $75,000 or about £60,000. A more recent study that used Gallup’s World agreed with this number, but in relation to the shorter term, ‘emotional wellbeing’ —how you felt in the past few days. In relation to ‘life satisfaction’, which is looking at your life as a whole, that satiation point occurs at $95,000 —as a global average. It helped reinforce that after a certain point having more money does not necessarily mean more wellbeing and happiness.

Another study we found early on in the design process came from Cambridge University in which researchers Sandra Matz and Joe Gladstone found that people who spent more money on purchases, which matched their personality, were happier. What’s even more fascinating is that matching spending with personality showed a bigger effect on someone’s happiness than their income or total spending. Namely, it’s not about how much you spend, but how you spend it. This is linked to a wider concept in happiness research of ‘cognitive congruity’, doing things in accordance with the person you believe you are, which gave us the inspiration to help personalise financial management.

With Quirk, we set out to understand these variables a bit better and we designed our own study in which we surveyed a large representative sample of the UK population over a number of personality, happiness, and money parameters in order to find new correlations. We found that personality traits and attitudes about money can influence financial behaviour and we used these to come up with a primary set of ‘money personalities’ that help users better understand their financial behaviour, and also helps tailor how they spend and save their money in a way that increases their financial wellbeing.

Find out how we did ‘Field research’.

The trial

Based on this entire round of research and prototyping, the team developed a native app that would be available for Apple and Android users. Throughout the development of the service, a large effort was made to develop an online following of users, by writing content, promoting the website, advertising on instagram to capture users who were interested in the service. This enabled the team to fill their initial beta trial of 100 users. Over the course of 2 months, the team was able to gather a range of insights about engagement with the service.

Overall metrics demonstrate good engagement

Overall the basic performance indicators from the trial demonstrated that the service was well received by most users. Throughout the app’s trial period, 75% of users completed onboarding and users checked in with the app at least one a week, with an average number of three bank accounts connected to the app per person.

Through the tracking of the advertising campaign, the team were able to discern that users were most interested in improving and learning about credit and building up savings, which was great feedback for future features Quirk can implement.

Additionally, approximately 96% of all those who installed the app completed the quiz. This demonstrates that almost everyone who downloaded the app was sufficiently engaged enough with one of the main features that they went through a fairly lengthy process of completing the personality test. This was a distinct indication that users were craving a personalised perspective on their finances.

Personality assessments are working

Another marker of success for the service is that all the four Quirk personality types were equally represented in the trial. This demonstrates that the quiz attracted users who typically didn’t like to engage with financial services. If that were not the case, there would be imbalances in personality types between the users. Another demonstration of the efficacy of the personality test is that it correctly predicted the behaviour of the users in the app. For example, the users who check the app most frequently are users who are defined by the quiz as ‘optimisers’ who would naturally monitor their finances more closely. This is an exciting prospect because it demonstrates the opportunity for creating highly personalised services and offerings once the service has gathered more data.

This is the right user

The other outcome of the trial is that the service is reaching its intended target user. The service positions itself as offering tailored education and recommendation, and during the trial, it attracted young people who were looking to build up their financial literacy.So, these users are being drawn to the service because it offers personalised financial recommendations, while educating them —ultimately demonstrating a strong match between user need and service proposition.

This also gives a clear focus for the future of Quirk. Currently, the main features c are the personality test and the clearer financial tracking. Now, the priority can be to strengthen the personalised recommendation capabilities that can support people in deciding what to do next.

Other services developed

Live Services

Hold

Live Services

Quirk

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

Early testing and development

We developed a prototype that would be the simplest version of our service- This prototype could meaningfully mimic the final offering, so we could experiment, understand the user experience and hone the final proposition before investing too heavily in a native app for the public.

Therefore,we created a web app which encouraged users to ask themselves a question and then subsequently answer this question. The intent was that users would inadvertently find themselves having a fluid conversation with themselves where they may recognise more of their own capacity to respond to their challenges with a clearer thought process.

We recruited 30 users aged 20-50 years old who had a mixed level of self-declared anxiety to use the service as much as they wished over a two week period. Through interviews with the participants, their usage data, survey responses and the contents of their conversations, we were able to gain many new insights about the experience of our proposition.

The most crucial learning was that most people were sceptical about the idea of having conversations with themselves. People often felt it was embarrassing, ineffective or weren’t quite sure what to do. However, we also found that some people (including some sceptics) were surprised that the process eventually provided strong results for them by helping them think more clearly, feel listened to or even feel less alone. With these main insights, we focussed on guiding and simplifying the conversation process and tried to manage user expectations from the start.

In addition, we found that people wanted more than to just have and store conversations, they wanted to be given a new understanding of themselves based on what they had written. While there are many advanced mechanisms for delivering more understanding, the team sought out new, simple methods to curate their conversations in ways that would show them new insight. One approach to this was to give more emphasis to an already appreciated mood rating feature within the prototype.

Find out how we ‘Updated the strategic questions’ to define the design research strategy.

What is the problem?

This service evolved from research on the EQLs design proposition where we explored how to reduce anxiety in people who struggle to self-reflect. EQLs offered people a range of AI characters to talk to that would support them, monitor their mood and alert them to patterns in their behaviour that influence their happiness. The topics arising from this proposition, which warranted further investigation, were about how people feel about having their emotional status analysed? How comfortable are people sharing intimate information with a digital service? And what types of values people can take from non-human interactions?

We continued our research and found that many young people suffering from anxiety were not engaging with self-reflection because it was often ineffective. And while conversational types of reflection with other people were valued, they were seen as unsafe from a social or emotional perspective, and therefore often avoided. This perception of a lack of safety was often connected to the idea that self-reflection meant you had a mental health problem and therefore shared some of the same stigma.

We chose an approach of developing heuristics that uses conversation to help people build rituals and skills for effective self-reflection in order to ultimately build emotional resilience and agency over their lives. We explored simple technological ways to foster the valuable attributes of conversation with ‘another’, because it is effective and familiar, but does not involve a second human— as it is seen as ‘unsafe’

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Google Play

App Store

Not much in order to boost my mood or help me if I’m not feeling great.

It surprised me that playing both roles in a conversation – physically typing the issue and then generating the response yourself is so effective. I might have been very sceptical to be honest but actually doing it showed me how helpful this is to my peace of mind.

What is Hold’?

Following the detailed analysis of the prototype trial, as well as online engagement testing and user interface experiments, we refined the proposal and developed a native web app, available on the Appstore and Playstore.

The proposal was positioned as a tool that helped people think clearly through difficult moments by enabling structured self-conversation. Essentially borrowing the format of conversation with another person, but making it safe, anonymous, private, always available, and easier to reflect on and learn from.

Structure self conversation

The main function of the app is a self-conversation feature. The user can start a conversation either by asking themselves a question or simply by saying whatever is on their mind. Immediately after doing this, they are asked to continue depending on how they started, i.e. if they started by saying what is on their mind, then they are prompted to ask themselves a question about what they’ve just said, and then subsequently to answer the question and so on. As they express what they are thinking, their words are displayed in a familiar messenger style conversation format that helps suspend the belief that they are discussing something with someone else.

The conversation can be typed or spoken and the words the user says will be translated into text. At any point, the user can hear an artificial voice (with an accent and gender of their choice) read out their words.

At the end of each conversation, the user is asked to rate their mood and define a title to apply to the conversation.

Conversation reflection

All conversations are stored with their titles in a log where they are organised based on the chronology or the mood rating they logged at the time. When a user re-reads a conversation, they can find questions from the app that encourage a healthy and inquisitive reflection of what was written. Additionally, conversations are grouped together automatically based on simple traits such as the most viewed, or highest mood rated. Beyond the automatic collections, users are also prompted to group conversations in more sophisticated classifications such as the topic, or the environment they were written in or the type of emotion they felt.

These different levels of reflective activity encourage users to use the app not just to vent and cathartically divulge their thoughts, but to investigate, consider and understand themselves further.

Guided thinking

Throughout the app there is a guiding voice which instructs the user if they are unsure about anything. It bolsters a perception of authority, builds the user’s trust and encourages them to engage with the app. It is this guiding voice that offers a steady selection of optional prompt questions during the conversation as well as reflection questions if they return to their conversations or create collections from them. The positionality of the voice is written to be neutral, trustworthy, informed, non-judgemental and open to support the user in whatever they choose.

Respectful in its position

This positioning of the guiding voice within the app was also mirrored through the entire environment and all brand touchpoints. We found in our exploration of the market that synonymous services tended to either ‘own’ the fact their service was a mental health app or disguise it with playfulness, but in all instances they still required the user to admit an emotional issue. Given the associated stigma, it seemed to put up barriers for many of our users. With hold, we try to be honest and clear about the tool rather than being too heavily branded. We reduced clutter, created neutral space and had no tacky characters in an attempt to respect the process that people are going through during use.

The science behind it

To create an environment that supports self-reflection, we enlisted well established psychological frameworks to underpin the structure and content of the conversations people construct.

The objective is to support the user in different types of reflective practice that can span from simply expressing what is on their mind, through to critical self-reflection (i.e.self-reflection that is more aware of time, place and context). The ultimate objective is to reveal deeper assumptions that may transform people’s lives.

The prompt questions in the app are designed considering the working memory model to enrich and bolster self-reflection at a cognitive level. This is done by encouraging expression that provokes long-term and short-term memory, audio and visual stimuli as well as multiple modes of thought such as simple expression vs critical thinking (Baddeley & Hitch‘s (1974) theory of Working Memory). The questions are also tuned to provoke varied modes of language, which help users illustrate their reflections with greater description, narration, examination or consideration, thus creating a deeper, broader engagement with the reflection content. The aim is to encourage greater awareness, control and insight about the reflection, the act of self-reflection and therefore their own thoughts, feelings and behaviours. (Cubero et al., 2008)

Encouraging the user to reflect not just on their situation, but on their understanding of their situation helps build their knowledge of how they think as well as their ability to plan, monitor and assess how they think. This is called meta cognition; it is a skill which may help build people’s emotional resilience and ultimately their ability to control their thoughts and their life.
(Schraw,1994; Schraw,1998; Schraw & Dennison, 1994; Sperling, Howard, Miller, & Murphy, 2002; Sperling, Howard, Staley, & DuBois, 2004 cited in Hussain: 2015; 134)

Through these models, we refined attributes of the guidance and content in the app as well as established brand positioning and features such as the text-to-voice playback.

The trial

From the 12th December to the 20th January 2019, we ran a trial where we promoted and monitored the app and subsequently conducted a series of interviews with engaged users. From the trial we took five main learnings.

The product is desirable

Over the entire period, we had 2712 users with an average of 11.3% of them returning to use the app later. These users completed 1123 conversations consisting of 6497 thought entries (different stages of the conversation). On average, 59% of people who clicked on our adverts downloaded the app. During our most optimised week, we spent £400 on advertising, resulting in 208 fully engaged users costing just £1.25 each to acquire. This high conversion percentage and the low cost of engaging a new user demonstrates that the proposition is highly desirable.

Conversations are valued in two distinct ways

There are two distinct ways that people found value in having conversations with themselves. Firstly, the initial expression allows a cathartic unpacking of complex, anxious or out of control thoughts, which provides an in-the-moment release and calm. Secondly, the subsequent extended conversation reframes users’ mindset so they can further understand their context and thoughts, and then potentially progress toward a conclusion —ultimately providing a calming way to process thought and reach new understandings.

Revisiting conversations can be challenging but offers reassurance, learning & pride

Different users engage with past conversations in different ways and for different reasons. Some users are intimidated by the intensity of the emotion in their conversations and avoid it to protect themselves; some users want to see their conversations but only when there are enough of them to find bigger insights or to feel proud of how many they have; and finally, some users revisit after each conversation. They return in a calm moment or a stressful moment, but when they do, they often find assurance that they can get through what they are experiencing because they can see the evidence that they have done so before. It also helps them learn and remember what works for them and they often develop a sense of independence, self-reliance and pride.

It is valued for being a private, convenient, neutral space to externalise thoughts

We validated that some of the critical attributes we had built into the service were valued by our users. Being able to write and speak thoughts, that were previously internal, helps people process them. And the fact they are stored in the app, lends a welcome sense of weight and significance to the process. Absolute privacy has helped people explore thoughts they wouldn’t have done otherwise and was a critical reason why some adopted the app. Having Hold available at all times created a sense of comfort and made self-reflection more achievable in people’s busy lives. The simplistic nature of the app and the light touch prompts provide structure for people, but leave plenty of room for them to act as they wish, offering a flexibility that respects their process.

Our users suffer from anxiety more than we expected

We found that our most frequent users are more anxious than we had previously anticipated. Through previous research we hypothesised that our most likely target user would be someone who is experiencing symptoms of anxiety, but is not formally engaging in professional therapeutic services and does not effectively self-reflect. However, the users engaging the most with the app were often already professionally diagnosed with anxiety type disorders and often had regular therapy. These users tended to prefer the app as a regular mechanism to manage their conditions and in some cases used the app and their conversations to inform their therapy sessions.

Emerging discussions

What has this service taught us more broadly? Beyond simply exploring what self-reflection can mean to people and how they may engage with it in the future, this service raises many new areas of interest with regard to people’s attitudes towards understanding themselves through technology. Below we discuss the service in relation to the original question: How might AI be used to help people gain agency over their lives? We briefly touch on four topics about harnessing valuable formats of interaction, about how people are treating themselves, what people need in exchange for their data and what it means for a service to have an identity and a relationship with its users.

Mimicking engrained interactions

This service invites people to act directly to improve the management of their thoughts and their lives. To do this, the core feature available is a small heuristic that mimics a conversation with someone else and in doing so, it insights learning and development. The fact that simply mimicking such an engrained format of communication has helped people engage with and understand complex thought, demonstrates an opportunity to explore co-opting other formats to enrich complex exchanges.

People are gaming themselves

In addition to the opportunities for exploring the co-opting of interactions. This heuristic also tells a story of people’s increased understanding and acceptance of their logical inconsistencies in order to help themselves. Simply by mimicking a conversation, this device enables people to overcome stigma and think more clearly, even though they are knowingly participating in an illusion or role play.

This willingness to indulge in an illusion that they are having a conversation with someone else, is an acknowledgement on the part of the user of their own human irrationalities and an awareness of the factious or demanding nature of their thought processes and what conditions are required to unravel a complex personal issue.

This speaks of a humble, pastoral dynamic people have with themselves and a willingness to bring technology into that dynamic, demonstrating a high level of trust in technology. People are essentially saying, ‘I’m unable to think clearly and while I want to speak to someone else that’s not appropriate, however, I can overcome these problems by pretending to have a conversation.’

Is this a sign of an emerging shift in people’s attitudes toward themselves that maturely embraces some of the anomalous irrationalities in human behaviour in order to develop more control and ultimately be happier? Is this a collective increase in meta-cognition? Does it demonstrate a shift in people’s relationship with mental health, the role that technology can have within it and a willingness to game themselves?

The price of sharing our data is to be shown ourselves

There is a commonly discussed public concern about companies collecting data about us and the power they may wield as that data enables them to understand us and potentially control us. Yuval Noah Harari speaks of a need to learn and understand ourselves so we cannot be easily manipulated by technology. This dynamic equates to an arms race of knowledge about ourselves. Services such as Hold build both sides of that arms race, enriching the individual and the company with knowledge of the user. Can this growth continue symbiotically? Will us humans reach our capacity too quickly? Will technology always have more scope for growth? Would this be technology companies greatest trick in gaining control?

When asking people what they consider as a fair exchange for sharing data about themselves, they are ostensibly responding by saying that they want the same thing companies do —to understand themselves. Does this mean people do not understand the risks of data sharing or does it represent how much people crave knowledge of themselves?

Who is the service?

Another interesting area of discussion that emerges from the service is about the relationship people form with the service as an entity. In this particular situation, the user mentally manifests another entity with whom they directly converse, but the app itself also has an identity. In this case, the identity is intended to manifest as a neutral, trustworthy, informed and non-judgemental presence that lends authority to the space and in turn helps the user respect their own process of reflection. In many emerging therapeutic services, the identity of the service is also the other entity with which a user interacts and converses with.

One of the challenges with designing the ‘Hold’ service was establishing the right positionality of the artificial ‘voice’ in the app (the instructive guide), so that it hosts the user in the space in the correct way allowing them to form the correct relationship with the activities conducted within it. There is a complexity in the interplay and overlapping of the brand of the service, the identity of any voices within it and the space. This complexity was carefully considered for our users, however, as we see more complex services emerge where some of the voices of the service are artificial, directly interacting with users and deeply engaged with a user in a long-term intimate exploration of themselves, there is not only an imperative to fastidiously curate that dynamic on a level not so far paralleled. But there is also a need to consider how these dynamics must be customised for each individual and how these relationships will influence people, perhaps years into a relationship.
Our service represents a willingness on the part of the user to engage with other entities of different, alien characteristics in an emotionally intimate and trusting dynamic. That trusting dynamic is fascinating, filled with potential, powerful and comes with a heavy responsibility

Team

David Freemeyer
Rhea Belani

Other services developed

Live Services

Hold

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Quirk

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Real emergent services responsive to the future

Live Services

Hold

Edit

Edit is an app that helps you fill your daily routine with more positive actions than smoking. It’s not about quitting cold turkey or feeling like a patient, it’s just about trying new things and seeing if they work for you and your lifestyle.

Quirk

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests, so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

Explorations Section

Explorations

Provocative future service concepts brought about by interactions between future people and their future contexts.

Propositions section

Propositions

Present-day concepts of future services.

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Dimensions of change

Work

Work becomes fluid, remote, unstable and performative The possibilities and challenges for working life continue to grow.

Dimensions of change

Body

Your relationship with your body may be pressurised but you could have more capacity than ever to control it.

Dimensions of change

Identity

Self Identity is challenged, open for exploration and the building of character.

Phase: Services

Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

Background

Experiments

What is Edit?

Track your progress

Try new things

Build a New Routine

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Propositions

Edit

Service visions

Eidos

What we’ve learnt

Engagement is a barrier

Incentive drives engagement

Usage context is critical

Track the Right Thing

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Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

Scenarios

Personal control

Emerging discussions

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Other services developed

Live Services

Hold

Live Services

Quirk

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Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Phase 4

Deliver Live Services

An overview of our design approach

The theory

The process

The direct application of this methodology

Services

Live Services

Phase 4: Deliver Live Services

Unit 1: Developing Services In-House

Unit 2: Incubating in InnovationRCA

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Case Studies

Live Services

Hold

Live Services

Edit

Live Services

Quirk

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Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Edit

Discover a smoke free routine

Quirk is a personal finance app that helps young people learn about and manage their finances according to their personality and interests, so that they can ultimately make better financial decisions that align with their life goals.

What is the problem?

Early Testing and Development

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Propositions

Spark

What is Quirk?

Discover your money personality

Track your spending across accounts

Tailored insights

The science behind it

The trial

Overall metrics demonstrate good engagement

Personality assessments are working

This is the right user

Recommended readings

Dimensions of change

Money

Scenarios

Emotional money

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

Emerging discussions

Automating or enabling