I only had a vague idea of behavior change principles before this class. Here are a few of the things I’ve decided to take away from this class.
Design Experience
I Loved Sketchnoting
I’ll admit I thought sketchnoting was really stupid at first (I’m not an artist, I told myself) and found myself more frustrated than satisfied because of how incohesive mine looked compared to sketch notes presented in class. However, I started using it in other classes as an incentive to focus on the lecture instead of getting distracted. This worked! I started to really enjoy the process halfway in the class and looked forward to doing them when assigned. The master class on sketching by Deb Aoki was enlightening for me — I started drawing everywhere whenever I was bored, which made for some fun times with friends goofing around.
[Drawn while waiting with teammates to get feedback from our TA on our final project. First time I tried out actually drawing pants on people instead of just sticks haha]
[Something I sent to my partner while I was bored in section. Why is there an angry bunny man in a skirt????? Was I mad???? don’t remember]
How Can I Challenge Myself More?
A few activities in this class felt very different from CS147, like system maps and bubble maps. I honestly wish we had spent more time on these because they probably would’ve changed the way we were designing our maps. Though I loved our app in the end, I wish that we had more time at the beginning of the class to decide what problem to work on and what mediums a solution could have manifested itself in — I would have loved to explore browser extensions, websites, VR/AR instead of turning straight to an app. I don’t even use that many apps every day. I feel like my thought process towards design solutions in classes has just turned into “what if we created an app that…”. Lots of problems with that. This is what I want to challenge myself with in future design classes.
What we could have done better (hindsight is key!)
- People still thought we were a social media app (we’re not). How could we have better used terminology/branding to help others realize this?
- Tested branding impressions
- We made so many small decisions along the way. How could we have better decided what features were key to our product and stuck to them as a team before adding on additional features?
- A lot of ideas were lost, like what if this app was a widget instead? We initially wanted for memos to nudge the user’s contact that they were reflecting on to facilitate a conversation — where did that go? Better organization of product decisions would have helped us make long-term decisions and reduce repeated conversations.
- I think our product could have catered towards more audiences, as in older generations. We’re in college right now and social media is huge, in some ways we are always connected. For populations that might not be as tech-savvy and live far from connections, how could this app have helped them? Should we have explored more personas? Yes. We most definitely should have. However, given the 10 weeks, us focusing on just one or two seemed valid.
Team Dynamics <3
I think what I’ll remember most from this class is my team. Coming into the class, I worried a lot about having a random group of people I didn’t know. Even in the first few meetings, I was constantly worried (Did they like me? Did they think I was overbearing? I had no idea) but with most things, the dynamic just came with time. I really loved working with this team. They were the reason I was waking up at 9:00 AM to get to class. I learned so much about their personal lives and extracurricular work outside the class, and I was just constantly impressed by their work ethic. These were people I could trust to get good work done, and who I knew would trust me to get good work done too.
Through our Tech Desk work sessions and the boatload of snacks we’d eat every time we met up, I realized that though I got really lucky with this team, I also learned how to adapt. I think that these design project classes teach you how to design but more importantly, they teach you how to design with a team and how to understand what your role in a team is + if you want to change that. That’s my most important takeaway.
[Maybe the real Rotary was the friends we made along the way]
Thanks for a great quarter Rotary!
Signing off,
Annabelle from Team 18
