Positive Product Design

Since Google and Apple made announcements about their digital well-being initiatives, there has been much more interest in positive tech or humane tech.

What is positive tech?

Positive tech is simply technology designed for well-being.

Why is it different?

Unfortunately, well-being is usually not what developers optimize. We usually optimize for productivity, attention, retention, or conversion. Well-being is usually an afterthought.

A positive product design process

Below is a process that can be baked into your existing product design work flows.

For ideas here are some useful links:

Positive Psychology Center at Penn https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/

Greater Good at Berkeley https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/

Live Happye Magazine https://www.livehappy.com/

Journal Of Happiness Studies https://www.springer.com/social+sciences/wellbeing+&+quality-of-life/journal/10902

For Measurement

There are lots more but this will get you down the right path.

Perma profiler by Marty Seligman http://www.peggykern.org/questionnaires.html

Ed Diener’s flourishing scale and life satisfaction scales.
http://labs.psychology.illinois.edu/~ediener/scales.html

Meaning in life questionnaire
https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/ppc.sas.upenn.edu/files/meaninginlife.pdf

Subjective happiness scale
https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/ppc.sas.upenn.edu/files/subjectivehappinessscale.pdf