My experience this quarter was an overall positive one. Coming into CS 247B, I had little – if any – familiarity with design thinking and the design process. My experience in the only other design studio I had taken before – CS 147 – was hasty, rushed, and didn’t allow for much actual learning of design as it allowed for a cursory survey of the process. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t really understand the design process and the reasons why we take each step and do each assignment prior to CS 247B. Thankfully, I can say that this course showed me the light – now I have a better understanding of why we do the things we do.
When I think back on the work we did this quarter, the part of the process that stands out to me most was the solution finding. To me, solution finding was the most engaging and instructive part of the design process. I really loved that we took the time and effort to build, test, and iterate on a solution – it really felt like we did several cycles of design to refine our solution. We first create a partial solution via an intervention, test it, then incorporate that feedback into our design. Then, we question our assumptions, design another set of interventions, test those, and incorporate the feedback into our design. And then we design a more polished solution, see how users interact with it, and incorporate that feedback into our design. All along the way, we learned so much about the users’ true wants and desires – and effectively incorporated them into our solution. This is key!
This idea of paying attention to the user – and I mean, really picking apart how the user feels and why they feel they way they do – will stick with me long after I graduate from Stanford’s campus. As someone who spent their undergrad studying among only the most technically-oriented and design-deficient courses, I have first-hand experience observing the brightest minds of our generation create the most mindless, consumer-lacking solutions for whatever problem they think exists. It is a little disheartening to know that the design process is not a required or emphasized part of a CS education – because, in my eyes, it is the most important consideration one needs to create a user-friendly solution. What’s the point of creating something for users if you don’t even seek out what the user’s want or feel? At that point, you are creating something that serves no one – and who wants that? In any case, I will sincerely take my experience with the design process into my professional and personal work in software engineering.
Still, there are a few parts of the design process that I could use more practice with. I still find myself struggling with the graphic part of design thinking – I struggle with sketch notes and mood boards and style tiles, and I have no clue how I would make an app’s digital design all on my own. It feels like the folks who do best with these parts have a sort of creative intuition that I don’t – and I am desperate to cross this barrier.
I really appreciated the inclusion of ethical discussion in this quarter’s process as well. Very few computer science classes seriously discuss ethics at all, fewer discuss it more than once, and even fewer incorporate the learnings into the solution. I appreciate having the opportunity to learn more about topics in ethical design, and to discuss those concerns with the people around me – even though we could never find an easy answer to the questions. I was most impressed with the instruction into inclusive and universal design – I’ll try to always look out for users and use-cases in my “blind spot”.
