Final Reflection
Overall, I had a great experience in this class. I really enjoyed getting to spend so much time working with my group and was happy that we were able to come away with a nearly-finished product/design by the end of the quarter. In class, I always appreciated the time that we had to discuss ideas and strategies with my team and feel like we were able to get a lot accomplished throughout the quarter due to the ample amount of time we had in class. I also really enjoyed the ethics discussions every Thursday.
One thing that I did not love was the sketchnotes. Maybe this is because I am not the most talented artist, but I did not feel like I gained a whole lot from those assignments. The sketchnote topics became repetitive and the drawing became a bit tedious and I often found myself more concerned about getting my image correct rather than actually digesting what the content of the article or video was.
This is more of a logistical complaint, but I really did not enjoy working with the higher common sense website. I feel like this was an unnecessary step in the submission process and was rarely a smooth operation. Copying everything over from google docs was a bit time consuming and uploading images was a huge pain…and there were a lot of images that we submitted. My group definitely would have preferred submission via google doc links or something else of that nature.
As far as the overall class structure is concerned, I could definitely see the need for each portion of the design process and it was clear how they all fit together. I would have preferred if we had some more time on the final stage of the process where we were actually constructing our prototype because that part did feel a little bit rushed. I realize it is hard with only a 10 week quarter, but I definitely enjoyed the last few weeks more than the earlier topics.
I really appreciated the baseline study portion of the class. Even though it did not necessarily work as we anticipated, the act of figuring out what we wanted to test was very helpful in moving us towards our final solution. Furthermore, talking with other people outside of my group (study participants) was super helpful and I definitely got some great insights from them.
This class was definitely unique compared to my other Stanford courses. It had the most in common with CS147, but I appreciated the increased flexibility that we had in this class. It makes sense given that 147 is a prereq, but I really enjoyed having some more autonomy over my work.
Ten years from now, I think I am most likely to remember conducting the intervention study, using my friends as participants. I actually found myself talking to them and checking in more than I would in a typical week which was both cool and productive for our project.
Ethical Considerations
Our project primarily relies on social pressure and organization to change behavior. This does include some minor nudging, but these nudges primarily come from friends. In future iterations, we might think about sending friendly reminders to our users about completing tasks but this is not something that we have implemented at this time. Because of this, I do not see nudging as a problem on our platform. The friend’s nudges are no different than sending a text message.
Privacy was something that we discussed quite a bit when designing our app. The major privacy concern is giving other people the ability to see exactly what one user is getting up to in their day. Although this is a serious concern, we give users the option to make tasks private which should combat this issue.
Our app ultimately became more universal leaning in terms of who it was designed for. Although it was designed specifically for college students, it could certainly be adopted by anyone and even used in professional settings. Reducing friction was of the utmost importance for us, so we needed to make sure that it was intuitive for college age students, but this was not a problem as this group is so tech-savvy.
Overall, I had a great experience in this class and really enjoyed working with my team. I feel like I have a great understanding of the design process and what goes into changing people’s behaviors. This class also reminded me just how stubborn humans are and why it is so difficult to get people to change. Nevertheless, I definitely have some new strategies to attack this problem and change my own behaviors in the future.
