Probably the most frustrating or biggest bump in the road this quarter was the unfortunate pivot that we had to take midway. Namely, because it wasn’t so much a pivot as a complete redo of everything we had done project related up until that point: the initial diary study, the lit review, market analysis, and intervention study. I think what was most hardest thing about it was that we identified the problem relatively early but continued to go with the idea since we figured that eventually we would be able to make it work, but since we didn’t I’m just wondering, at what point in the design process is it reasonable to hit the brakes and reconsider the plan. Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, the amount of work that we actually ended up redoing when compared to industry timelines is trivial. But in the context of the class we ended up doing kind of a lot of work over, and it felt like we wasted a lot of time. I’m not sure what the right answer is here, but in a way I felt like I got a glimpse into what it’s like to force a product or idea to work, only to hit a brick wall and have to backtrack. At least I know what the feeling kind of feels like so if I’m ever in that position again in the real world, hopefully I’ll be able to recognize the feeling of trying to force an idea.
Another thing about this class that was a genuinely new experience was integrating ethical considerations into our design from day 1. I think this is a product of the countless ethical discussion that we had during class, but besides when I was designing products specifically to assist with inclusivity (assistive technology), I had never included tasks specifically meant to address ethical questions in the MVP. Of the four tasks that our clickable prototype was able to accomplish, an entire task was dedicated to the ethical consideration of allowing people to cultivate a space within the app where they feel safe, by muting content they don’t want to see. This feature actually came directly from one of our ethical discussions and was one of users favorite features, according to our usability tests. Aside from our ethical discussions I think the structure of this class, also allowed us to implement this as opposed to the structure of a class like 147. In 147 a task like this would have been considered too small, or too tangential to the point of the app to be considered worth the time and effort of implementing it, especially in code. So I think the format of the project where we were given a lot of freedom to experiment with Figma, really fascilitated this feature, which would have never been part of an MVP in class like 147.
