Before this class, I thought that I had a fairly solid understanding of the design process and that CS 247B would just be a fun opportunity for me to exercise the knowledge I’ve acquired from product design classes and past UX internships. This class, however, was so much more. It allowed me to witness and experience firsthand the nuances and complexities of design, reshaping my view of the five stage design process to be significantly more involved and messy. I’m glad to have been able to take away so much from my first HCI class at Stanford and am more eager than ever to further my HCI education.
I really loved how the class integrated ethics into the lesson plan each week, challenging us to think beyond whether our design is accomplishing what we intended and focus more thoroughly on analyzing the impact that our design decisions have on every potential user. Through the ethics discussions, I’ve noticed that we are constantly asking questions that seek to find a balance between seemingly ends of a spectrum. How can we find balance between protecting user privacy and using user information for personalization and convenience? How can we find balance between designing for a niche audience while being inclusive of all user types? How can we find balance between designing to please the majority and designing to invite and include the minority? These conversations have reminded me that design never settles, and instead, is a never-ending project that continuously needs to be revisited, reevaluated, and improved upon.
Throughout the class, I’ve also been exposed to tools and methods in the ideation and research stage of the design process that I never knew of before. Models such as connection circles and fishbone diagrams will surely be included in my design toolkit for future projects, and I would also like to utilize storyboarding more often, as it was a method in the class that surprisingly turned out to be more insightful than I expected. In using the product-as-hero storyboarding technique for our project, we were truly able to dive into the mindset and experience of a user, empathize with their struggles, and be able to uncover some underlying intentions and motives that we didn’t consider before.
In designing for behavior change, I’ve come to realize that all design in itself is behavior change, a way for users to interact and engage with the world around them in ideally the way that designers have determined will benefit the user. In that sense, no design is neutral and all designs utilize nudges to get users to behave a certain way. It was incredibly interesting to investigate and question where that fine line between acceptable nudging and manipulative nudging is. In the context of my team’s project, GoTouchGrass, we explored a number of nudges to encourage users to spend time outside. These include reminder notifications to complete a daily challenge, setting the default reminder frequency to three times a day since users often stick with the default, and censoring the weekly recap until the user completes five challenges to visually prompt them to continue the challenges. In brainstorming these nudges and making them acceptable, we ensured that users could easily adjust their reminder frequency so they weren’t tied to the option we proposed, and we also included a reroll feature for the prompts to provide users with as much autonomy and control when using our app.
I’m incredibly proud of the final product my team and I were able to develop in just ten weeks. In completing this product and studying behavior change, I was able to experience just how complex and multifaceted behavior is, teaching me to critically evaluate and continuously reevaluate how I addressing the causes behind the behavior. If given the opportunity to flesh our product out more, I would have loved to explore more incentives for getting people outside or dive even deeper into our existing idea of photo challenges and perhaps additional features that could be built around it such as a social component to be able to maximize retention and engagement.
Taking CS 247B has provided me with numerous new design methods and techniques that I am excited to employ in the future, and it has inspired a strong sense of responsibility and motivation to continuously ponder about the ethics behind the design decision I’ll end up making. I am reminded that there is always the opportunity to learn more about design, and I cannot wait to carry the knowledge I’ve acquired from this class into my future design projects. Huge thank you to the teaching team for an amazing quarter!
