Reflecting on my quarter

What I did

Because of the virtual college experience my team had gone through, we wanted to find a solution to the problem of staying socially connected with friends, especially as we return to normal in-person interactions. We sought to build a personal CRM that helped people keep track of their connections and also make it seamless for them to strengthen them.

Screens from our mockups

Before and after taking this class

I came into this class having taken my first HCI class (CS147) a year ago, however, since taking that class, I have grown immensely as a frontend developer and have gotten a better sense for visual design thanks to industry internships. I was still lacking great design skills i.e. Figma and product development, so in CS247B, I wanted to translate those newly found skills into a tangible product while also continuing to learn more about the design process. This class surmounted my expectations, and I absolutely came out of it with integral learnings. 

One thing I believe this class did better than CS147 was the pacing. CS147 was packed with short assignment turnarounds and gave only two weeks to build out a full scale app. This class eliminated the coding portion which allowed for lengthened focus on the design process. This allowed me to better soak up all the different frameworks and approaches we used to derive our problem space and product. One thing I would definitely use again are the 2×2 maps we used. They came in extremely handy when we were mapping out user interviews, product ideas, flows, and comparative research. Maps were the key to helping us visualize data and identify spaces where we could fill or spaces that needed more attention. Another thing I really enjoyed was the hands-on work we did during class. For example, when we were able to work with physical sticky notes and bounce ideas off one another with white boards, I really felt like our ideas were growing and we were getting closer to a product. A few of my favorite memories were doing the journey maps and storyboards in class with my team. It was not only great to see what my teammates were thinking about, but it was even better to see what other teams were doing with their insights too. Overall, I had a blast and I thoroughly enjoyed being in a class with like-minded people who all wanted to get better at creating and designing a product.

Another goal I had going into the class was getting better at designing things in Figma, and I believe I achieved that. I learned how to create a design system, create reusable components, put together flows with prototyping, and much more.

Some screens I was happy designing:

Ethical considerations

The ethics readings we did this quarter were definitely helpful in helping us design our final product. The nudging and manipulation readings were applicable because our personal CRM product was supposed to nudge people to interact with certain friends: something we gleaned as helpful from our intervention study. We had to think of the best ways to word these nudges so they didn’t seem manipulative or forceful. For example, instead of using phrases that sounded mandatory such as “Do this”, we opted for looser phrases such as “Try to” and “sometime soon”. This was also helpful because it prevented the user from thinking about their social interactions as a means to an end.

Privacy was also a very important ethics question we had to think about when designing our app. This is because our app relied on a lot of integration with other apps such as calendar apps, messaging apps, and social media apps. Therefore, we wanted to think about the best way to get users’ permission to share their other apps’ data with ours. Luckily, many of these external apps have public APIs that can be accessed and have their own privacy settings built with them. However, we didn’t have time to consider fully how we would deal with the algorithm behind nudging users to interact with certain friends. If given more time, we’d definitely look more into this and see what would be possible and what wouldn’t.

Now I think this

Given everything I learned, I now feel more confident in creating a product or doing simple product management or design. Although I am an engineer at heart, and I plan to do engineering in the future, the skills I earned from this class are still integral to my growth in industry. Already, in a company I am working with this upcoming quarter, I am seeing words like OKRs, KPIs, and storyboarding thrown around. I’m extremely thankful this class will allow me to have a better understanding of what is going on and what I am working on. Thank you!