Final Reflection

Before this class, I thought about all the habits in my life that I would love to get rid of. I thought about my struggle being disciplined, especially with exercise and diet, about how much I rely on caffeine to get through the day, how many times I pick up journaling and stop 3 days later. I always thought that these failures were a reflection of me, that I was undiscipined, and maybe I am, but I tried so many times and failed and I just wanted to understand why.

I remember one of the readings we had to do talked about the idea of stacking a new habit onto an existing one. For example, I drink coffee every morning, so after drinking coffee I will do 5 yoga stretches. I remember thinking how easy this seemed. I could just add new habits right after ones that I did all the time, and then incorporate them into my day to day. I tried to use this alone and also failed. 

The best thing about this class (for me) was the sketchnotes. I used to do them on Sunday evenings, as a way to wind down from my weekend. I loved drawing without the judgement of not being as good, and I remember almost everything I drew, compared to all the times I take notes and never even open them again. This is the habit I will carry with me to other classes, other projects, and explore all the ways my mind can be whimsy and playful. 

I am always interested in the user more than the outcome of the project, and I always want to understand why users make the decisions they make. For me, all the tools we learnt to analyze our user interviews will be used in projects I hope to be a part of in the future, from the journey maps, storyboards, empathy maps, etc. I got introduced to these tools in CS 147, and now everytime I build a project/app or analyze it my first question is always “Who is this for?” I never used to think about that before and I would just have an idea and build, which is great for quantity but not useful if nobody actually needs the product. I love designs and products that have their users at the forefront of their minds, and you aren’t just building, but you are building for a specific someone, and that makes my heart flutter a bit. 

A big surprise for me during the work I did this quarter was how much it would end up affecting my choices as well. Our project was on reducing AI use for students, especially college students, and at some point last year I started feeling like I didn’t know how to balance AI use in a way that didn’t make me overdepend on it or get left behind while everyone was 10x faster. I remember when we started the project, and I wasn’t really sure we would change anyone’s mind about their AI use, and now that we have concluded the project, I am the one whose AI use has considerably changed. I kept thinking about why I was using it, (our users kept saying time, deadlines, speed etc), but these were not the reasons why I was using it and I needed to know why for me our intervention wasn’t particularly aligned. I later came to understand that I didn’t trust myself as much as I trusted AI, I always thought it was smarter, but through readings and talking with users and my team I have come to realize that no one singular person is ever the smartest, so I should be okay with sounding a little dumb sometimes, making grammatical errors, writing unpolished emails, and not getting a 99.99. I think that is what our project did for me, it made me understand my use case of AI, and expose what I was unknowingly afraid of.

In terms of interface design and design justice, one of the issues we were worried about when testing our prototype was that it could aggravate the emotions of feeling inadequate to users who were suffering from mental illness. Our AI rot brain avatar had messages that would be displayed to the user: if they were using AI well, the messages would be positive but if they were using AI badly, the messages would be negative. We changed this to have the users select which mode they wanted, nice, chill or more frank, so that they would have different messages depending on the mode they were on. 

In terms of privacy, our extension doesn’t store the user’s actual AI conversations at all. We have a database, but it is just for the user’s login details, not for the content about what they are using the AI for or what they are looking at on their screen. For us, privacy matters a lot, we want our users to be aware of their AI use, but not through surveillance and collection of their data. We also don’t store the user’s protected characteristics such as their ages, their gender, etc. because these are not relevant at all to our behaviour intervention design. 

Now, I look for nudges and manipulative designs all around me, because I know what they are and what they are meant to do. I am more aware of how shopping websites nudge people to buy more stuff, I can see how social media apps make me want to keep scrolling forever, and I appreciate knowing how to spot all these. I am grateful to Christina for all the book recommendations she showed us in lecture, and I can’t wait for Spring break to read a couple. Thank you to the teaching team for a fantastic Winter quarter.