Before the class, I thought…

1. Sketching is only for designers
2. Screeners did not exist in the user research process. What were those? Had no idea.
3. User personas are not too helpful beyond the design process other than aligning people behind a tangible goal or vision
4. Architecture has nothing to do with app design
5. It’s not possible to create something meaningful in 10 weeks – one can only hope to go through all the motions

[Snapshot] I learned to…

✍️ Sketchnote. 

It’s a technique I’m definitely taking with me beyond this class. Knowing how to take visual notes for written material or lecture content became a superpower of mine that keeps me occupied while digesting content more meaningfully than just typing verbatim notes. It’s exciting to see the evolution of my sketchnoting skills 😆

🤗😳😔🤧 Draw people and emotions with Deb Aoki. 

Illustration is a powerful narrative tool – a way to ensure your opinion survives the cognitive filters we all unconsciously channel to deal with cognitive loada. I’ve already brought this skill set beyond the classroom into my internship to illustrate feature ideas! I can’t show them for ~NDA~ purposes, but here are some illustrations from this class!

🔬Develop an interview screener.

It was a useful and invaluable skill, but not one I intrinsically enjoyed or would like to continue doing. I prefer to define the target audience, then maybe hand the reins over to someone else to define the screening questions 😁.

🤪 Create expressive, relatable personas.

Personas have traditionally been a “step in the design process” I had to get out of the way despite already knowing the gist of the user I’m designing for. However, in this class, I explored using Bitmojis to make a persona’s journey feel real and was able to find empathy within myself to truly design for them. 

🤝 Be a true teammate.

Perhaps what I learned most in this class was not the tools, techniques, and ethics that I’ll carry into the industry, but the ways of working in a team. Every time we butted heads, something newer and cooler came out of it. I believe the key was setting the norms that we should always be giving each other constructive criticism – and do the most we can to help each other grow as designers, experimenters, and product people.

This was the first time I felt intentional in a design class – truly believed that the concept we produced could tackle a problematic behavioral pattern at its root. It was not something I expected out of any design class at Stanford, where at ten weeks the most I’d thought to expect was to go through the motions. My teammates were everything in making that *magic* happen.

What I wish went differently

I wish our team had spent more time socializing the secondary research we’d found with one another – many of the insights our solution ended up using (i.e. identity-based rewards) could’ve been refined earlier if the entire team had realized that Sean’s literature review findings supported self-esteem as a positively correlational factor to self-control.

I also wish that we’d run just one intervention study instead of trying to run two with only 5-7 participants. We basically could not use any findings from our intervention study because of how sparse the amount of data we collected for each testing cell was!

Ethical considerations

My team ended up using rewards in our final project, but that decision was laden with debate. On the one hand, we were fresh off our reading about how rewards in UX design exploit the physiological responses that we have no control over. On the other, we wanted to boost our user’s motivation to make decisions that are (1) more closely aligned with their personal goals, and (2) beneficial to their baseline wellbeing. That’s ethical, right?

The conclusion we arrived at was grounded in a rather philosophical argument that rewards must underlie every single action we make – even if it’s a small dopamine burst we don’t consciously register. Therefore, rewards in themselves are not unethical. It’s rather the purpose for which they are used that should be judged – and our goals are honorable enough.

But we also need to take responsibility for developing extrinsic reward dependencies within users in their behavior change. Should the extrinsic motivation be removed, would we have impacted their life in any positive, lasting way? Our main focus thus became trying to make the “reward” element as intrinsically grounded as possible. So we reframed our rewards design to strengthen users’ sense of self, to a point where they feel strong enough to move away from online shopping as a mental crutch.

Now I think this…

1. Drawing pictures helps everyone focus on human needs and concerns instead of just tech and business needs; it also protects your insights and ideas because visuals are more memorable!
2. Screener surveys or interviews are essential for high-quality research – ​​they act as a sieve to capture your intended audience and filter out the ones who don’t quite fit the bill so you can work smarter, not harder!
3. I think before this class, I didn’t have very high regard for user personas because I’ve only seen them in contexts where they seemed to be created without critical questioning of whether the information that’s being included is actually useful. And thus we end up focusing on the wrong things. A good persona – aka a digestible, memorable, and actionable one that feels real – will expose many design opportunities.
4. Architecture maps like bubble diagrams can help designers visualize the relative proximity and sizes of different UI components/pages.

   

    

5. With a thoughtfully cultivated team dynamic, we can create anything – even within 10 weeks 💪🪄.

Next time when faced with a similar situation I will…

• Sketchnote more in my daily life – send meeting summaries as visual sketchnotes, take lecture notes visually, and draw out the contents of anything I read and find interesting.
• Think more about what my professional footprint will be going forward – is my next employment decision going to mean I’ll be stepping on others? Or am I treading carefully?
• Strive to design more controlled studies, even in the whirlwind environment that is design thinking. This piece was inspired by my amazing teammate Sean’s wisdom – always test the smallest cell of information, because it will give you the most straightforward answer to even the most ambiguous questions.