Final Reflection

Before this class, I had no experience with the design process or design principles. I thought designing an app was just something that spontaneously happened on the back of a napkin in a crowded bar or at 3 am before your CS107 final when you feel like you’d do anything to drop out of college. This class has really helped me see that designing an user experience need not presuppose tequila shots or academic crises (although the pop quizzes did).
I loved working my way through the process, uncovering new steps in the process like I was going through a scavenger hunt. Many times, the process felt tedious and the assignments felt like busy work. However, as I walked fellow classmates though our clickable prototype, I was struck by how all the incremental work we had done had come together. For example, running baseline studies helped us understand our target audience and their problems better. This understanding became the foundation of our solution, thereby allowing us to make a truly impactful app. Usability testing helped me see holes in the user interface that I would not have seen otherwise because I was so close to the app. Now that I have seen how all the incremental steps add up to the final product, I think I will use all the steps in our project again if I wanted to design another app. On the other hand, I hated sketchnotes. As someone who was never introduced to sketchnotes before this class, they felt frivolous and far too much work for little educational value. I would never do a sketchnote again unless you put me in a time machine and sent me back to first grade.
A specific problem I encountered during the project was a lack of communication from one of our teammates who was super engaged in class and occasionally contributed well to assignments. Other times we were met with radio silence and turned in assignments with his portion of the assignment untouched. Over time, the rest of us learnt how to navigate working with such a coworker. I think this was a valuable lesson for me and I learnt a lot about communication, thinking quickly on your feet before a deadline to make sure the work was getting done but no one was feeling overextended trying to get work done.
Overall, we got some great feedback from users during the prototype walk through and I would love to work on the app prototype and build those ideas out further. I have never felt excited about continuing to work on any project during my time here at Stanford, (which is a testament to how much I dislike coding), and I will remember that excitement 10 years from now.
I do not think we incorporated nudging into our app apart from the hard limit of exiting the app while trying to focus, which is the core premise of the app. I personally also do not see the ethical perils of nudging (?) I feel like it is up to any user to know better than to be nudged into recognizing nudges and doing things they do not want to do. There is of course fundamentally corrupt premises that would negate this, like nudging someone to hurt someone, for example. I also wonder how my own academic privilege of being educated on recognizing nudges from a younger age plays into my bias here.
I think we did a good job with user privacy, specifically with the financial security aspect of taking in credit card information. I think in the future, users could use focus groups they are in to track if other users are on their phone and responding to other friends (think: creepy stalker ex-boyfriend).
Overall, I really enjoyed my experience in the class and look forward to learning more about design.

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