Troubleshooting Humans: Using UX To Make My Brother Brush His Teeth
An experiment in applying UX principles outside of the digital realm.
My brother is a 20-year-old Sound and Music Production student. He’s chatty, musical and kind. Speaking as his older sister and only sibling, I am very proud of him. But he does not brush his teeth.
The dentist, my parents and, of course, my brother, are all aware of this problem. But we didn't know how to solve it. Repeated trips to the expensive hygienist plus parental nagging weren't doing anything. But maybe I could.
I’m a User Experience Designer as well as a big sister. My job involves using research insights to improve digital experiences for the end-user of a product/service. These insights are then used to meet, and sometimes define, key goals for the business providing these deliverables.
But what does that have to do with teeth brushing, I hear you cry?
Well, a big part of UX is problem solving: my job revolves around troubleshooting the effectiveness of an experience in order to satisfy multiple parties with varying goals.
UX also shares many of its empathy-related principles with the methodical approach of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (check out this article for more info on the similarities between therapeutic principles and design thinking). My brother's problem wasn't a digital one, but it was still a problem to sink my teeth into (see what I did there?) and learn from.
To this end, my family became stakeholders in a teeth brushing solution. My parents were the B2C business employing me, so to speak (with my work falling into the purview of "Can you make him do this?" sibling territory, like certain homework tasks have done in the past), and my brother was the customer on the receiving end of the design solution.
The work also had a deadline; I needed to come up with a solution to the problem before he returned to university.
Understanding the Problem: Why isn’t he brushing his teeth?
I decided to start where I believe all good UXers start: uncovering the why of the problem. I sat down at the family dinner table, listened to what was being said, and asked questions to help me understand why my brother isn't brushing his teeth. What made him brush his teeth in the past? What factors prevent him from doing it now? What is he not saying in front of our parents that I should follow up on later?
When it comes to my brother, the most important question is the last one. There are things he’ll tell me that he won’t tell our parents - the higher ups in this scenario - and we’re practised in translating each other’s mannerisms for the sake of their understanding. I vouch for him like I would for a user, but I was still surprised by what I learned from our informal interview later that evening (AKA one of the late night chats that comes out of sharing a bedroom).
The deeper I dug into the teeth brushing problem, the clearer it became that my brother’s why was related to disturbing people. He didn’t want to wake up family members at god knows what time of night with his hygienist-prescribed electric toothbrush, so he only brushed his teeth if he went to bed at a sensible time. Unfortunately, by this point of the coronavirus-imposed holidays, my brother was practically nocturnal.
I learned that the only reliable solution he'd found to the problem was the one I'd suggested earlier that day at the dinner table: if I refuse to let him into our shared bedroom until he's brushed his teeth, he has to brush them (though I later learned that any teeth brushing reminder that specifically came from me would do the trick).
But the solution wasn’t sustainable. I wouldn’t be there to nag him when he returned to university, and I wouldn’t always be awake enough to bar his entrance to our bedroom.
Measuring the Problem: The Toothbrush Metric
Now that I had a basic understanding of the why and a few potential solutions to the problem, my next step was to measure which approaches were sustainable. This presented me with a new challenge: finding a metric that worked for all interested parties.
I wanted to get a baseline measure of my brother’s teeth brushing behaviour so I could measure the effect of my design iterations and have tangible results to show the higher ups. In theory, it was as simple as asking my brother whether he’d brushed his teeth that morning/evening, why/why not, and logging the answers in a calendar of results, like a very abbreviated version of a traditional diary study.
In practice however, I quickly realised how difficult it is to measure a (supposedly) daily routine activity when your concepts of night and day don’t match up. My brother’s "day" could start at dinnertime (6-7pm) and end anywhere between 4-8am, so I decided to focus less on the time of day and more on the context surrounding the behaviour itself. Instead, I asked him: "Did you brush your teeth before you went to bed?" and "Did you brush your teeth after you got up?".
After a week or so of doing this informal research, I learned that there were even more factors at play than I’d uncovered in our original interview. How actively sociable my brother was during his "day", how much he drank, and his boredom levels before bedtime were just three of many additional factors that influenced the likelihood of him brushing his teeth. As with his sleep schedule, there was little I could do about these factors, but it was still important to consider them when designing my solution.
Designing the Solution
In the end, my solution was very simple.
I made a sign.
Two signs in fact: one for the bathroom door and one for the bedroom door. I experimented with swapping them around.
The signs were a tangible teeth brushing reminder for my brother that didn’t necessitate me being conscious at 4am.
However, there were snags to this solution as well. Like with banner ads on a website, it’s easy to ignore something once you’ve grown accustomed to it. My ongoing research indicated that the sign worked some of the time, but not all of the time. The contextual factors I mentioned before played a big part in that.
Conclusion
I have yet to figure out a surefire method for making my brother brush his teeth because, in the end, I could only influence aspects of his home environment. He’s happily nocturnal at university now, but part of me is still plotting the next iteration of my design solution (it will involve torches, blu-tack and a thicker pen!).
Nevertheless, I have learned a lot from my brother’s concentrated brush with UX (heh. Not sorry). I knew it was important to constantly look and ask for the "why" as a UXer, but now I understand why UXers do that. Context is everything, no matter how well you think you know your user.
Have you ever tried to troubleshoot a behaviour? Let me know how you got on! I’d love to connect on LinkedIn and hear your thoughts. ❤️
