Before this class, I have had plenty of HCI experience and have enjoyed working in a team, researching users, designing, and building. I have encountered most material from this class before, so I joined hoping to work on an interesting project with cool people (and also because HCI depth is unnecessarily large, in my opinion).
First, on logistics:
I absolutely loved my team — we had a perfect mix of productivity and laughs together. Team works in-class time was the best time for me — especially because I’m more technical half of my team were strong designers, so I enjoyed learning from them a lot! In return, I felt like I had some technical knowledge to share (that I didn’t get to use as much in this class, which I don’t mind).
A few things didn’t work for me. First, this class met — 9:30am was way too early, and I found myself participate less because I was so sleepy. A lot of the material could also be condensed, in my opinion. Additionally, while I appreciate that Christina took all the students in (we have got to graduate, after all), I thought class-wide discussions did not work that well. Group-wide discussions went a lot better. And I wish we started designing earlier and spent more time on Figma.
I appreciated how much the teaching staff did for the students — the TAs were so clear and responsive on the slack, I found them extremely helpful!
Second, on the project: this prototype was my first work related to food. In my previous HCI classes, there seemed to be an abundance of food-related projects, which always seemed a bit overdone to me. So, I always pushed for my own niche interests. In this class, I decided to open up and purely follow whatever shows a need that could be solved via a behavior change intervention. And I’m pleased with the process and the result — I found the topic engaging and fun to work on, even though I have a very neutral relationship (as long as it’s healthy, I really don’t care that much how good it tastes, at least compared to my friends). So my takeaway from this experience is to be more open to project topics that don’t directly involve my passions; I now think the people I work with and the need matter more than what I theoretically want myself to be working on.
On the manipulation prompt, we encountered a problem at the very start when choosing a habit to change. When we started discussing food-related interventions, we had a discussion on eating disorders and frankly feared we would be ‘canceled’, as is common in western societies, for picking a taboo intervention and manipulating those people. To solve that issue, we very clearly agreed who this app isn’t for (i.e. people with difficult relationships with food), and we did not faced any backlash while working on the project. We also used gentle, supportive language in the onboarding and throughout the app. We try to employ non-intrusive mechanisms in order to avoid any sort of manipulation — the app only has user data so the user can only compare with themself, and we don’t send notifications but instead rely on the well-designed menu meal planner to invite the user to open the app before meals.
After this behavior class change, I love thinking about tiny habits! That reading was by far my most favorite.
Thank you for your support!
