Tristan Sinclair – CS247b Final Reflection
Don’t judge it till you’ve tried it.
I’ve never thought of myself as a creative person; I was never any good at drawing, coloring, painting, or even creative writing for that matter. I never disliked it, but I was always better at math and sports, so I found comfort there. After coming to Stanford, I discovered CS and fell in love with it. Quite quickly I fell deep into it, taking all the hard coding classes and choosing the AI/ML path. I never had time to give the whole design thing a go because I was focused on playing ball and graduating early so I could try for the NFL. Things don’t always go as planned– I’m back at school this quarter to play my 5th season of football and work on my master’s in CS.
When trying to choose a path for my master’s, I researched Carta (specifically the section on hours/week) for days, formulating the master plan on how I could take the easiest courses. I settled in on the HCI track– the hours for the HCI requirements weren’t even close to those of CS 140, CS 143 or any of the other classes I would be doomed to taking for the other tracks. This was my intent walking in the door of 247 on January 11th, 2023. Basically, I thought design was a bunch of BS and I could focus on football for the rest of my days at Stanford.
Wow, this is kind of cool…
CS 247b completely changed my perception of design and how enjoyable it can be. Taking this course provided me with the chance to tap into my creative side, something I hadn’t done much in the past 10+ years of my life. During this class I spent time learning how to draw and even cutting and pasting images from magazines, things I haven’t done since probably elementary school.
Learning to brainstorm better + be a better teammate
While the time spent drawing and using kid’s scissors was fun, we did some more serious work too. One of my first major takeaways from class was learning how to brainstorm better. I’m a large football player, with crazy hair, and I talk too much and listen too little. Christina taught us when brainstorming, individuals who are shy or feel intimidated often struggle to share their ideas and opinions. My current full-time job is running around on a field in front of fans and hitting people, so ya, I probably intimidate people who live the civilian life. After hearing this and receiving feedback from teammates, I knew it was important for me to allow space for other peoples ideas. It was never my intent to hog the mic or take up more space than necessary, but either way I was doing it.
One tactic we learned in class to prevent against this was to have before having a group discussion, have an individual brainstorming session, in which team members can write their ideas out on sticky notes first. This forces ideas to be small, but also makes them written down and increasing the chance to be shared and seen. If only a couple people in the team share their ideas, you’re losing out on a lot of brain power. Later in the quarter, when iterating on our ideas I focused on leaving space for others to share their ideas. With more talking space, teammates shared some incredible ideas which I loved far more than my own, and the learning experience was cemented in for me.
Research is hard work but it pays off
Another lesson I learned during this process was how important it is to do research on ideas and markets before getting any further. While competition doesn’t mean you can’t create something anymore, you can use research on competitors and problems to create better products. Our group was focused on the behavior of getting people outdoors more. While there was clear research that being outdoors has beneficial mental and physical health effects, there was also incredible research on using gamification to get people outside and even about the shortcomings of apps which were geared to do exactly what we were also trying to achieve. These papers were insightful and allowed us to try to optimize the best features of our competitors into one product.
In addition to doing some digging online, learning the process of conducting real product research ended up being super interesting. Seeing your incredible ideas crash and burn and no one use your product can be quite humbling. But it opened my eyes to see that it isn’t that easy to design something that keeps users coming back and remembering to do something without me guilt tripping my friends to participate. Developing a product and getting real feedback takes a lot of work, and it isn’t so cut and dry. Using real people showed us that.
Empty the tank for the best results
While this class was incredibly fun and not terribly time-consuming, I think the one thing I would want to change was to just bring more energy and juice to class everyday. Once I got over the “design is a bunch of bs” hump, I felt myself more engaged with the material and excited to learn in class. However, there was still juice left in the tank and hours I could have spent maximizing the experience and being a more active partcipant.
Ethics!
Moving on to the ethics portion of my reflection, I felt it was important to seriously think about the importance of accessibility in design. After hearing John Tang’s lecture on inclusivity in design, I thought deeply about how difficult it would be to be an individual with a disability that would limit my ability to use devices. Our project did not develop features which made the product accessible. While Christina made the point that it isn’t easy to work on these issues when you’re trying to develop a new product at a small startup, which is clearly the truth, but eventually when working on a larger team I recognize the importance to make products available to users who are disabled.
