I enrolled in CS 247B because I had always been fascinated by behavior design. Having never taken an HCI class before, I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect. I had learned about the principles of design thinking, but had never applied it to an actual long-term project. I’m really glad CS 247B was my first real introduction!
What I loved most about this class was its emphasis on learning by doing. I much prefer project-based classes to PSETs and exams, and I thought the topics covered in this class were especially conducive to a 10 week project. The class had a great structure and very well-designed assignments. It was definitely a fast pace that was challenging to keep up with at times—I guess that’s inevitable when trying to squish the entire design process into a 10 week course. Still, I thought the teaching job did an incredible job of extracting the most important aspects of the design process and transforming them into meaningful assignments. I never once felt like the work I was doing for this class was useless, redundant, or irrelevant. Each step in the process encapsulated an important nugget of wisdom for me to learn. The deliverables were also timed very well in conjunction with our weekly ethics discussions. It was a great mix of hands-on experience and theory-based learning.
There are a lot of tools and methods I learned this quarter that I plan to keep with me beyond this class. Below are my top 4:
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- Baseline studies. Interviews were the only method of needfinding I had been taught. However, I really appreciated the insights my team and I gained from conducting our baseline study. I think baselines studies provide so much more detail of the exact problem space than interviews, especially when dealing with human behavior, habits, and mindsets. It gives a more realistic snapshot than interviews, which often involve an additional “filter” of the interviewee’s internal biases, background, and pre-existing attitudes that skews the insights you get.
- Assumption mapping and testing. It was so valuable to confront head-on what my team and I’s assumptions were. Not only did it help us refine our eventual solution, but it also provided us with a lot of comfort knowing that we had tested the biggest and most crucial uncertainties in our project.
- Wireflows. I thought wireflows were a much more realistic and helpful tool than the high-fidelity expectation of full wireframes. With wireframes, you are creating with two objectives in mind: 1) incorporate all the necessary functions and 2) make it well-designed. However, trying to achieve both within the same task can be incredibly difficult. Wireflows removed the second objective, and made it a lot easier to focus my attention on the first objective and do it well, which then made our eventual wireframes way easier.
- Style tiles. Style tiles were a great way of consolidating the most important aspects of our brand into a single source that can be easily referenced. I also found it to be a really useful brainstorming tool for crafting a cohesive and visually pleasing brand that communicated the message we wanted to convey.
There are also a couple tools I personally didn’t resonate with as much, namely sketchnotes. (I’m sorry, I know how much the teaching team loves them.) It’s strange—I thought I would really love sketchnotes since I am a visual learner. In practice, however, I found that sketchnotes simply weren’t the most effective nor efficient way of taking notes.
All in all though, the tools we used in class were incredibly valuable. Employing them revealed a ton of amazing insights that led my team to a problem space that I am personally invested in: taking meaningful and restorative breaks.
CS 247B also expanded my vocabulary and understanding of important ethical considerations in behavior design. One of the most interesting discussions we had in class was the one on nudges and manipulation—specifically, what constitutes an ethical versus manipulative nudge? To what extent is it acceptable to change someone’s behavior through intentionally designed tools? This sparked a lot of contemplation about the nature and requirements of autonomy, and what it meant for that autonomy to be infringed upon. In addition to influencing the direction of my team’s project, these discussions in class also provided a new lens through which to re-evaluate the nudges present in my own life, from Instagram’s addictive algorithm to YouTube’s video recommendations. Since then, I’ve come to a more nuanced understanding of what is acceptable to me, what I was willing to keep in my life, and what I needed to change/remove.
After completing the course, HCI and design feels much less like a black box to me, and more like a challenge I’d be ready to face. While I used to think design was all about the creators, this class demonstrated to me that design is in fact, all about the users. It’s incredibly satisfying to slowly break down a problem space, employ my creativity to come up with solutions, and actually build that solution. Next time, if I were to be faced with a similar situation in which I had to create a solution for some problem space, I would feel much more equipped, confident, and up for the challenge. I would probably spend even more of my time observing and listening to my users, as I believe that is one of the most important aspects of the entire design process: creating something that actually solves the problem it is meant to solve. In addition, I would really think hard about the ethical implications of whatever I was putting out into the world, drawing from all of the things we discussed in class. I’m very grateful that the teaching team put such an emphasis on ethics and positive impact, rather than just usability or even profitability. More than anything, I want to make sure that anything I create does good instead of harm, and this class has equipped me with many tools and ways of thinking to facilitate that outcome. A huge thank you to the teaching team and my lovely group, Michael and Arjun, for making this class such a fruitful and enriching experience!
