Before this class
I took this class mainly because I was convinced by a friend and it fit conveniently in a spot where I was dropping another class. I’m also a CS-HCI major so at some point I needed to take a CS247 so why not now. My understanding was that this class was CS147 with no high-fi prototype and I expected to go through the sequence of that class with a different problem space for the solution my team would make. Going in I was a little worried about contributing to my team since my Figma experience is almost zero and there’s no programming.
What did I love and hate
I was lucky enough to have a team that gets on well and has a good range of skill sets. I hated that I know everyone wasn’t that lucky and it sucks that your grade is tethered to random strangers. I also found it infantilizing to have to clap to restart the lecture and it made the expectations for the class confusing. At some times, we’re expected to act as if we’re start-up founders, considering the long-term ethical and technical consequences of our products and the next we’re reduced back down to students in a classroom. I also didn’t particularly enjoy having to not sit with team members for hour long discussions since I haven’t heard my team members thoughts on these issues either and understanding them could not only have helped us move forward with our product but if there was downtime we could’ve worked on our project.
What tools and methods worked and didn’t
I’m glad I picked up Figma skills during the clickable prototype since I’ve already seen it used in the industry and have been meaning to get more use with it. It might be due to me being a developer more than a designer but I don’t see myself using the diagrams and mappings we did in class after graduation. I also would not use sketchnoting in future classes since I see images of what I’m reading in my head already so drawing them out wasn’t much of a visual aid or reinforcer. When I think back on my sketchnotes I remember the act of doodling much more than what content I was doodling about.
What could’ve gone differently
I wish that CS147 was a harder pre-requisite. There were many times in class where we recycled 147 material and making a reading for those that haven’t taken 147 would’ve made those sessions be more productive. I also wish that there was more time to ideate on a problem space. I think a big contributor to why so many teams had similar or identical problem spaces is because we only had our “measure me” results to go off of and a larger discussion on problem spaces could’ve helped.
Ethical Considerations: Privacy
We really valued giving users control over their information during the creation of our clickable prototype. Every time we needed user information we had permission checks and made them aware of what we were using and for what reason. I think a further extension of this if given more time would be to add flows for revoking permissions.
Now I think this
The class was about what I expected in terms of sequencing, it was CS147 but no high-fi prototype. We did the flow of needfinding, assumption testing, low-fi, med-fi as expected. I was pleasantly surprised that we didn’t have a mandatory section and I enjoyed the flexibility it gave to scheduling team meetings. I was surprised that even though there were no prescribed topics like in CS147 studios, the problem spaces ended up being pretty limited among 21 teams. I’m glad I grew my design skills and creativity a smidge and learned Figma, I thought it was much more of a barrier then it ended up being.
Next time
I gotta give a shout out to Annabelle’s (belleball) fantastic PM skills, I want to utilize a lot of the strategies she used that helped start our team out on a good foundation in future team project classes. For example, she pushed hard for us to use Facebook Messenger over iMessage cause the read receipts would help keep us accountable and even though I was a little hesitant it turned out to be a super good recommendation. Also setting up a team drive and agenda sheet was superb. I can’t directly point to any strategies I learned in class that I would reuse but I think that goes back to a note I had earlier about being more of a developer than a designer. In almost all of my professional work, my job was to execute designs given to me rather invent them myself and I also don’t see myself ever creating and launching a product so I will likely not to needfinding on the scale of a problem space, most likely if I were it’d be down to the scope of a feature. At the end of the day, finishing this class gave me confidence that if need be I could do it all over again, which I most likely will since taking another CS247 fulfills a different HCI requirement.
To the teaching team
I also gotta give a shoutout to Krishnan for being our team’s primary TA, he gave so much detailed feedback on a pretty tight deadline since after the midpoint write up we started making the most of those extra day deadline extensions. He also ran the entire project fair and several lectures, major props. To everyone else, thanks for giving us constructive feedback when and where you could and for becoming more lenient with some grading like dropping 2 discussions and making most assignments for credit.
To Team 18
Thank you all for contributing to the major friend vibes! I know we had some long meetings but in the end it all came together and I’m proud of all you guys and the project we made. Hopefully we can work together sometime again in the future but until then…..
Signing off,
Serena Kravantka
