Before this class, I thought this is a programming course that teaches us how to develop a mobile app from the backend. I’m not a CS major, but I was interested in building apps because it might come in handy when I work in tech companies one day. And this class has been a pleasant surprise to me. It showed me the human side of this problem, and topics I’ve never considered before, such as ethics, user study, personas, and habit formation. Some of the techniques covered in this course are surprisingly productive and these different ways of problem solving will be useful for so many other projects. Taking notes on post-its and grouping them to find insights is extremely helpful in sorting convoluted user data, and it has been my top choice throughout this course. During mid-quarter we started doing visualization like drawing persona stories and sketchy screens. It’s so satisfying to see myself drawing these simple yet pretty demonstrations, and I actually used paper prototypes when I tried to design a cage for my pet hamster thinking about how to best arrange her furniture. That idea originated from the prototype reading when I saw the 3D domestic design example in it. Despite these cheerful memories, I did have some moments of doubt. When we tried to apply different techniques on the same subject, I felt like the work was repetitive because they generated little additional information. Synthesizing baseline study is one such example. Post-it grouping is intuitive to me because it comes right out of the data you see, but when it comes to fishing bone and connection circle I feel like I had to make things up to fill all the blanks. I had similar feelings about persona, because although we used changing methods like proto-persona, journey map and story board, I’m actually rephrasing the same information in different formats.
I’m satisfied with our project now that it’s finished, but in the beginning the concept of maintaining friendship seems mediocre to me. Voting results are sometimes disappointing, but I think agreement is more crucial to teamwork. Though we started with an ordinary topic, we could still dig out what’s missing in the market to produce something unique. As I worked on it I gained more and more confidence about it thanks to the creative ideas from the whole team.
Everyone has good manners and cooperates a lot, if anything I would say people are too polite to form debates out of which brilliant ideas may come out. Changes are hard even within a small design team, because at least I feel uncomfortable persuading others to pursue another idea over their current choice. But we managed to gradually polish our design, making a combined calendar and social app. I wish we had a story sharing feature that allows users to see what their friends are up to, which might encourage them to hang out more.
We believe that inviting and scheduling is the hard part that prevents people from socializing more, so our app tries to make invitations quick and easy. People will get notifications when their friend invites them, and we also send notifications when they’ve forgotten to socialize for a long time. We’re exploiting the fact that people can’t always ignore their friends, so this nudge might be pushy to introverts. Though it has the risk of becoming uncomfortable to some users, they can easily quit the app or turn off their calendar visibility to avoid invitations. In that sense the nudge is not manipulative. User privacy is our major concern because we do need people’s calendar and contact to run the app. In addition to explicitly requesting for user consent when we pull that information during on-boarding, we only use the minimal information we need, i.e. everyday free time, to avoid disclosing users’ track. We’re also thinking about allowing users to set free time visibility to friends they select in order to give them more control. I think safety is guaranteed because user activity or location is invisible. In terms of inclusion, our app is gender and race equal since as a calendar+social app we don’t use and we don’t need any suggestive color, pronouns or reference. The two personas we had are busy people and introverted people, which are broad enough to include most people who struggle to improve their social life. These two types are also specific in the sense that those are the main reasons hindering social life as revealed in baseline study. We took the approach of value sensitive design because the app is centered around facilitating communication and reducing social pressure. We respect people’s distinctive need for different levels of social interaction by stepping in only when they need help with calendar arrangement and reaching out.
This course has taught me to sympathize with users, understand their needs and respect them. It pointed out to me things I’ve been overlooking, like underlying manipulation in our daily life. Now I realize that making a product for users is not just selling them an idea and extracting their value. A win-win is possible if we find the gap in the market and satisfy the user’s actual needs. In the future I’ll conduct user studies and comparative research before I finalize the problem space to avoid impractical assumptions.
