Me Before 247B:
Coming into this class, I’d taken several design-focused classes within the bioengineering department during undergrad and done extensive educational material development about the biodesign process during a COVID-inspired gap year. However, as a CS coterm, I was excited to try something new in the design realm. 247B seemed to be a unique opportunity to tackle something I’d struggled with immensely: changing my own behaviors.
Doing the damn thing:
I loved…
-
- Sketchnoting! I especially enjoyed Deb Aoki’s lecture. I’ve long been self-conscious about my drawing, and while that hasn’t completely changed, this tool seems to be one of the most valuable I’ll take from this class.
- The measuring me and subsequent diary studies at the start of the quarter. I felt that I learned a lot about myself, the behaviors I wanted to change, and the difficulties of getting users (even myself) to do anything with consistency.
- Learning effective strategies for changing behavior. Associating anchors with prompts is something I’ll be using for years after this class to change my own behaviors.
I hated…
-
- Recruiting for studies. If I could do this class again, I think I would choose a target audience that forced me to stretch beyond the Stanford bubble because asking friends to do studies and annoying them to send results my way felt icky.
- The disjointedness of class. While I appreciated that we were trying to do a lot in a little time, it felt like class got away from being a studio frequently, especially because so much time was spent on lecture and discussion that not infrequently felt disjointed from the work we needed to do as a group. Additionally, as Christina noted at the start of the quarter, little class time is dedicated to building out the product itself, which feels like a missed opportunity in many ways.
I was surprised by…
-
- The talent of everyone in this class! Especially in terms of the final products and user testing, I was extremely impressed with what teams were coming up with and their design/figma chops.
- How important the team feedback discussions were. While they did not always resolve issues or disputes within the team, I think they allowed team members the space to voice their thoughts that often isn’t considered within team projects, especially those that last a full quarter. More frequent, smaller check-ins could’ve helped our team overcome some difficulties that were festering and surfaced near the end of the quarter.
- How I felt about Divert, our final product. While the problem of excessive scrolling that we tackled throughout the quarter is one that I struggle with myself, I don’t feel like we came up with a project idea that was groundbreaking despite its novel aspects. If I were to do this project again, I would want to tackle a more niche or specific issue that I could dive deeper into rather than such a wide-reaching behavior. I also wish we had dedicated more time to brainstorming earlier on and given ourselves space to pivot/redirect.
Behaving Ethically:
While our project relies almost entirely on nudging via screen distortion and was motivated by a behavior that is detrimental to user well-being (screen addiction and doom scrolling, I believe the privacy implications of our project require much more attention than other ethical areas we discussed in this class. The doomsday scenario led to a particularly important discussion among our group, as there are all sorts of possible security issues with our app. In order to distort a screen, we need access to an alarming number of critical user settings, both phone-wide and within specific apps. An astounding amount of user data would be exposed to our app, and I think it would be very difficult to convince users that our app was secure enough to trust.
Me After 247B:
After taking fall off, this quarter was essentially a big trial run for me. My first coterm quarter consisted of trying out a bunch of classes in different areas, and I’m excited that I settled on security as a concentration (while still being hopeful that I’ll be able to take more HCI classes in the future). I’m excited to extend sketchnoting to other areas of my life, including teaching, and I hope to use anchors and nudges to change my own behaviors as I move forward in the world 🙂
