Before this class, I thought that one pad of sticky notes was enough for a person to own. I was severely mistaken.
As a product design major and debating HCI coterm, I was excited to cultivate and improve my technical design skills, applying what I had previously learned in my time as a PD major towards a viable digital product. Honestly, I came into this class completely blind. Through word-of-mouth of other coterms, I only knew that 1. It would be helpful in deciding whether the HCI path was right for me, 2. Somehow we end up with an app, and 3. No coding (wooo!)
This class completely blew the (albeit minimal) expectations I had out of the water. Despite the crippling 9:30 a.m. start time, I found myself excited to come to class every week. It was exhilarating to see my input, collaboration with other humans, and overall effort materialize into a plausible app. What’s more, I gained some pretty great friends in the process 🙂
Class Experience
I appreciated how thoroughly the process from ideating through finalization was broken down and presented day-by-day, directly contributing towards our final goal. Even topics that I initially thought were redundant (such as bubble maps versus journey maps), ended up being of immense help in guiding the direction of wireflow creation. I remember during the sketchnotes quiz being impressed with seeing how each component built onto each other.
Speaking of sketchnotes! I underestimated how much time they took, but realized only when I needed to spew out information how much they stick to my memory. It’s a new strategy of learning that I had not previously been privy to, but I found myself using this strategy outside of class for information (both in class and personal journals) that I especially wanted to retain. No doubt it is something that I’ll keep in my arsenal of study techniques outside of this class.
As I reflect on the lectures I remember most from class, all of them have to do with some sort of interactive activity (sticky notes, drawing, talking with others, competitions), whereas what I ended up needing to revisit multiple times were the more static lectures.
A major aspect of the class that I wished were different and that I was surprised to find out was how little interaction we would have with people outside of our teams (save for the ethics discussions). It wasn’t until near the end of the class when this started to change, and I found that the input from outsiders was incredibly helpful for finding blindspots in our solution. It would have been insightful (and also very fun) to have been given outsider insights and perspective throughout the design processes (even if it’s just a 5 minute discussion).
As for conflicts, I think I hit the teammate jackpot in this class. Of course, we all had different perspectives on what the “right” direction was, but each conflict on what to do was always resolved through discussion and compromise. This was especially seen when creating the wireflow. It wasn’t until prototypes were drawn out that we realized that some of our visions greatly differed from others (i.e. what the timer would do and look like). Though, with some conversations on pros and cons on each idea, we would reach a consensus whenever this happened.
My group consistently was on top of what they needed to complete, giving each other feedback and fairly delegating the work week-by-week. It was a really cohesive, supportive, and communicative group that I had lots of fun working with. Also, with all of them being older and some already having some professional UI experience, I was able to learn new tricks and shortcuts on Figma from them.
(look how cute we are!!)
Ethical Considerations
The behavioral change my group decided to focus on were increasing mindful movements in users’ day-to-day lives. And so, Momentum was born!
When the gist of the class was introduced as “creating an app for behavioral change,” my mind immediately thought to gamify whatever the behavior we decided on was. So, you could imagine the crackle I let out when in week 6 we learned about how manipulative gamification could be applied both digitally and in real life (like in a job).
I appreciate how many of these little “woah!” and “aha!” moments I had with the ethics discussions and readings. Like gamification, there were many dimensions of these controversial topics that I previously had not considered, and it was interesting to see how my group and I navigated these newfound insights as we built our app. We went from thinking about external motivations and rewards to focusing on how we could cultivate intrinsic motivation without excessive dopamine rushes.
We thought a simple solution would be best, and we landed on a reminder system with an emphasis on affirmative language and reflection. We thought the reflection and scheduling aspect of our app was crucial to mitigate the manipulation of nudging, as the idea would be to engage with and cultivate the user’s intrinsic motivation, allowing them to complete a movement at a time where doing so would be accessible and nonintrusive.
Furthermore, we heavily considered who may be excluded from this app, both through physical/cognitive abilities and external accessibility. Our goal was to make Momentum as inclusive as possible. Taking into account physical mobility and potential environments, we decided to include different actions of mindfulness that the user could choose to partake in when given their reminder (if a person is not able to stretch, they can take a minute of deep breathing). We also considered mental abilities, wanting to create an app that would not overwhelm the user and was simple to interact with. As such, we went with a minimalist design with warm, energizing hues (also taking into consideration whether a person with colorblindness could easily interact with it). When we learned of different dimensions on how our app could potentially be excluding a demographic, we tried our best to find solutions with simple onboarding and setting to make Momentum as inclusive as we could make it.
In the Future…
I have a lot more appreciation for the process of creation done before any designing is actually completed. In the span of 10 weeks, I’ve been made aware of maps, models, new methods of user interaction/testing/feedback, methods of storytelling, new careers, and more. When looking at the calendar back in the beginning of the quarter and seeing how the UI would only start to be considered at around week 8-10, I remember raising an eyebrow since, well, that’s what I expected the majority of the class to be. Looking back, it now makes sense as to why so much emphasis was put on these different processes. It’s fulfilling to look at our final product and remember all of the discussions, pivoting, and design practices that our team considered
In future projects, I’ll take more time to respect the behind-the-scenes of design, especially ethics consideration in who is being built for. I severely underestimated how guiding models are in really narrowing down objectives and connections, and is something that I will be more cognizant in applying in future projects (in general, not just HCI/PD).
Finally, I’ll try my darndest to find the sturdiest Nina-adjacent dog for moral support in whatever future ventures I take on.
Thank you for a phenomenal quarter!
