As a student who has taken several classes of the same structure, my main learnings in this class revolved around team dynamics and redesign process. Before this class, I admittedly thought I was a decent designer. However, coming into 247B, during the prototyping stage, I realized how big a jump needed to be for a design to look polish, thoughtful, and modern. During 147, I definitely learned that critique was easier to give out than it was to imagine the ideal in the first place. However, since my team back then was extremely design oriented, we were able to see many versions of the same concepts being highlighted. This gave us more power to evaluate options and choose the optimal look for every category. In contrast, our team here was very split in skillset. This put the load on certain individuals to design and with several members, the expectation was that there was less flexibility in redoing things if it “works.” It gave our team less refined products and taught me the value of numbers on specific teams. The multipurpose skillsets did lend a hand it creating something that was less niche, however.
On the team front, this project really tested my theories on what a good team member was. I think it is easy to say a team member who does not work is a bad team member, but this project highlighted the complexities in that. It allowed me to better understand what made me a bad team member and also made me consider ways I could become a better team member based on things I did not like within our culture. For example, I realized that while there might not be any physical harms in my procrastination, there can be some mental stressor that are placed on my other members. Reflecting on other’s approach to being a teammate, I realized how important trust is in a team dynamic. I think that the feeling of not being trusted without reason made me realized that I might have been a bad team member in high school and that I would not want to work on a team where I could sense that lack of distrust. I think the largest problem we encountered during this class was team dynamic issues and having clashing ideas on what is acceptable really set us off. In the future, I will ask my members about their goals and motivation because I think it drives the project in my directions. I also think the boundary on acceptability of work is so crucial. In these conversations, I will ask with examples if there is silence, because I remember asking at the start and it was quite silent.
One thing I loved about 247B was that it had a large ethical component that was more salient than in other app development classes. It is inherently crossing more boundaries, since we are trying to influence people for better or for worse. I really liked the ethics discussions we had and in many ways reconsidered the ways I design for people and how I design for business. I would say that I am still on the fence about the feasibility of designing for profit and would love a class that integrates that more in the HCI discipline. This would most likely be the only I really dislike about this class and other HCI classes though. We never consider the profit and our teachings are useless and unless we do, since our work will never buy in without some contribution to the company well-being. Morals do not seem to be that pertinent of a consideration the the grand scheme of things for these tech giants and teaching us ethical design with incorporation renders us powerless in the meeting rooms.
In terms of tools, I felt like I had lots of growth in the Figma realm of things. I served as a main designer for a lot of the projects and thought that this class made me much more efficient in my usage of Figma. It also gave me a lot of confidence, since I did not think I had that many skills until I realized I could answer most of my teams questions. I do think I have some room to grow in developing charts though. For now, I realized that most people do not care about content if it looks beautiful for better or for worse. This had really strengthen my PM-ing skills and I hope to further grow in this capacity as an aspiring TPM.
In a redesign of the app, I would like to change some of the colors out, since blue is not a very inclusive color. I would brighten up the environment and add things to create more differences between certain tabs that felt too undistinguishable. I do not think our app was unethical, but it was intrusive and I think it will just have to be up to participant’s own desires, since it is part of the app’s core functionalities. In addition, I’d like to make buttons large for people with less motor control. I think inclusive design was our weakest point and that with simple changes, we could elevate the app. However, the types of distortions we considered were done in light of people with other disabilities and that is one thing I am proud of.
Overall, this project has made me reflect more inclusitivity and harm when designing, strengthen my Figma skills, and affected the way I view teamwork. I took out a lot more than I thought I would given that this is my fifth app-based course and I am glad to meet the people I did.
