Before this class, I thought this would be a very interactive class and I expected a lot of discussions with my project partners about tweaking details of the project.
I love how this class allowed me to get my hands dirty in the surveys and interviews with real potential human users. It felt very qualitative and down-to-earth, which motivated me to develop our prototype. I did not enjoy the process of having to find a certain number of participants within a short amount of time, but I did enjoy the interactions elicited by begging friends to do these surveys for me.
The lectures felt a bit lagged from the milestones we were pushing. There were a few instances where something was due soon, but we were still unclear about the instructions. The concepts and examples were really helpful, and I enjoyed a lot about the interview practices and the activities we did in class. Some new concepts for me like assumption maps were illuminating to view future design problems. The interview exercises also helped me to get to know more people in the class, which increased my sense of community.
I found Figma to be very powerful in terms of creating prototypes and allowing users to get a first taste of what the APP tries to achieve. I plan to learn more about Figma techniques for my future projects. I even got inspired by one HCI student to use Figma to create my final exam cheat sheet because of its flexibility in arranging graphs and texts. I also found the use of sticky notes during ideation very convenient and inspiring. Personally experiencing the flexibility of moving notes around, categorizing, and structuring pieces of information feels very satisfactory. Sketchnote improvement is another valuable takeaway from this class. The guest lecture we had about drawing faces or little human figures boosted my confidence in using drawing to express my ideas or describe others’ ideas. I did not find grounded theories to be very useful at the first stage of the project. It was not easy to build connections between our general grounded theories and specific persona traits.
I experienced surprise when Anna and Nick changed the layout of our prompts page from text-heavy to graph-heavy, and that was impressive for me to observe how different representations of the same information induce different reactions. I was also surprised about the fast-paced of this class where we actually did not get to communicate details of our product and defaulted to a certain status of trust to let one team member make decisions for the group milestone posts and let go of the possibility that the rest of the team may disagree with the decision. I could totally understand the intention of this action pattern because we were under time pressure, but I think the outcome would have been better if we had been given more time to critique each other’s work instead of taking a leap of faith.
A specific problem I encountered during the project was figuring out the final writeup format and expected content quality. I tried to resolve it by first asking for an example submission, then setting a deadline to have a rough draft for staff to review, and asking my project partners to comment on the Google document of the draft for further feedback.
One thing that is still unresolved about the project is the usability and effectiveness of our progress page. While we were able to fix the color and shape of all buttons, we kept the original functionality of checking things off. We have not tested whether that is going to help users or not.
One underlying issue that surfaced is my time management. I tend to work on homework at night or before deadlines. But this is not a good habit when it comes to group work which requires a group consensus before submission. Next time I will be more cognizant of my habit and communicate with my project partners about their flexibility.
Ethical considerations
Our project uses conversational prompts aid to encourage users to have a longer and more meaningful conversation with their friends or potential friends. They are acceptable nudges because the prompts are just presented as an option instead of a strict requirement, so users will not feel pushed. Because of the passive nature of text prompts, they avoid becoming manipulative. Unless in the future, we design a more personalized prompt page which might enforce more pressure on users to use them by thinking that the generated prompts may be better than what they would have come up with.
Since our project does not have a social function that connects users, it avoids much of the potential leakage of user data. If we also encrypt user data in our database, it would be very hard to link the data in our database with a specific person in the real world. If we decided to create a social function that allows users to see other people’s logs of their social interactions, then it might become a privacy problem to determine the visibility of user info and data.
After this class, my thinking has definitely evolved to be more careful between the gap between what the designer assumes to be true and what the users think of the prototype. I am very grateful for all the interactions I am lucky to have with all of my teammates, Anna, Nick, and Ananya. My attitude towards teamwork in design has also changed because I realized that the designing process does not only require artistic creativity but also careful formulation of the problem and testing it. Next time when faced with a new design project, I will be more aware of the talents of my teammates and communicate clearly with each other’s working styles so we are on the same page. I also want to apply the method of having routine team health checks to ensure the consensus of the group.
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