Honestly, before this class, I thought this was going to be a repeat of 147 and 247A, which I had taken multiple years ago. So, I was a bit unsure of what I would learn from this class. However, I think one of the biggest things I took away from this class is that there’s so many more models to learn about and practice with; clearly, it is possible to do three to four 247 variants and still come away with relatively different experiences with each of the iterations, despite being technically the same class.
Overall, for this class, I really loved that Canvas was supposed to be the catch-all for the assignments, so I just needed to check on Canvas to see if there was anything due the next day. However, something that continually slipped my mind were the ethical discussion questions. I have no idea why but I somehow missed four of them and just forgot to follow up on them. I think this is mostly on me regardless.
In addition, I was a big fan of Christina’s style of teaching and she honestly just seems like such a great person to be learning from. It sincerely made me much more willing to get out of bed for the 9:30 session. And though it may seem minor, having Nina there to pet genuinely improved my class experience every day.
One thing that I felt was a bit unresolved for the project overall was the feedback loop between the TA’s commentaries on Canvas and the impact that it has on the project. Perhaps it’s too much work on part of the TAs to follow up with each team, but I think a weekly meeting with the assigned project TA to discuss the comments made on Canvas would have made the feedback loop tighter and made a more significant impact on the work that we produced. And because we often quickly moved on from the assignment after these comments were made, there wasn’t a great deal of attention spent on going back and applying the feedback given to us. That may just be a team based issue, but I do think weekly meetings may help either during class or outside of class.
I think one method that stood out to me was journey mapping in that it simply didn’t click with me. I think the particular type of journey mapping that I did for the personas made the least impact on our project and I’m not sure if I would utilize it heavily in the future. Journey mapping seemed to work quite well for a number of other aspects but it seemed to be a bit clunky when used on the already imagined personas.
On the topic of personas, something that I wish we, as a team, did a lot better was selecting a persona and sticking with the vision of the persona. I feel like through all of the chaos that is a winter quarter at Stanford, our team lost sight of the original persona that we had chosen and ended up creating an amalgamation of different solutions for the three personas that we had chosen earlier on. Maybe it was because we couldn’t solidly agree on which to focus on, without stepping on each other’s toes. But, I felt that the lack of clear definition and direction in persona made our prototype a little bit too general in its focus when it could have far more focused.
One discussion that I particularly enjoyed was the nudge-based paper and discussion because I felt like it allowed me to take a stance on certain “nudges” utilizing certain principles that are very clearly argued out. I will likely continue using these principles in determining whether something is manipulative or not in the future.
Something that will always now come to mind in the future is accessibility concerns thanks to the various discussions we’ve had. I will admit accessibility is always a rough challenge as it requires additional time and effort spent to resolve issues. In addition, it often requires an aspect of creativity that makes it difficult. However, I think the statistic of nearly 19% of users having some type of impairment was very illustrative in showing how many users you casting aside by refusing to account for accessibility concerns.
In addition, thanks to our exercise of imagining the worst possible scenario in class, I was confronted with a number of ethical dilemmas including one dealing with privacy and a potential abusive spouse limiting TikTok usage that I could never have even imagined our app would be dealing with. This gave me the insight that even the most innocent apps can run into ethical dilemmas that require a great deal of design consideration to properly address. And in the future, I will no longer brush aside ethical concerns just because the app is “too simple” or “there’s no way something can go wrong with something like this”.
Thanks again for a great quarter and I hope this class continues to get even better than it was this quarter!
