Jin-Hee Lee’s CS247B Final Reflection
What a quarter! I’m thrilled I was accepted into the course and have honestly had a wonderful time with the course, in huge part due to the relationship and rapport Krishnan has with all of the students, plus how much I got to talk to a variety of classmates and HCI peers I hadn’t spoken to before. Let’s get into everything…
Before this class / coming in
This was my 3rd CS247 course – I had taken CS247G with Christina my junior year and CS247S with Julie my senior year. I’m happy I got to work in a different environment in a new focus area, since habits and behavior are something that are relevant to everyone.
Before the course, I believed that you need to convince the behavior-changer that the cause is important in order to change the behavior: for example, having someone go vegan requiring them to care about the ethics of meat consumption or sustainability. But we learned early on in the course that behavior is made up by habits, and there are so many layers and factors that we might not even realize come into play for a behavior. Models such as the stock and flow or the connection circle helped me see that.
In previous project-based HCI courses like this, I had primarily worn the PM hat and was excited to get my hands more on design, since our final product would be on Figma rather than code.
My experience with developing the project and the class
Things I loved: getting lots of class time to work with our teams, synchronously checking in with our TAs and with Krishnan every class, Krishnan’s enthusiasm and the relationship he built with the class to have comfort and rapport, mixing and mingling for things like interview practice to talk to different people, not having to cram in a ton of coding in the last week, getting to practice more low-stakes drawing, like this:
Things I didn’t love (I don’t think I hated anything!): I wish we had more guidance on the design fiction (even having earlier progress-check deliverables) and the assumption testing. These felt sort of thrown in at the last minute, even though I know they were brought up earlier, I wish there was slightly more structure in crafting those deliverables the way we had structure for things like the baseline study.
I really appreciated the way my team worked synchronously and made efforts to respect one another’s time and busy schedules. I found how much easier it is for me to get things done when I’m in the same room as my team, opposed to distributed work.
Thinking about my other HCI work at Stanford, this was likely the first time I had to create a Figma prototype as the most experienced Figma user on my team. I don’t consider myself a Figma expert at all but I’ve used it in many classes, so there was definitely added pressure (by myself, on myself) to ensure everything was perfect. I feel much more competent and trust myself more after having done this, though!
Ethical considerations
Nudging and manipulation: alpaca.ai mostly works as a facilitator to lower the obstacle to spending time with friends, but we do include a nudge on our home page of “friends you haven’t seen in a while,” including their name and face. We understand that seeing a friend’s face can make you think of them and be moved to reach out when you otherwise might not have thought to. To lower the pressure, though, we include 3 friends in this section to make It feel less like a directed attack that you haven’t seen one specific person. This could become harmful if it causes overwhelming guilt in a user that might be going through a difficult period of intended social isolation, but we believe they likely wouldn’t open the app if that were the case, and thus wouldn’t see the nudge in the first place.
Privacy: calendar data and friend network are both things that I wouldn’t want shared to just anyone. For example, what if I have sensitive doctor’s appointments on my calendar that only I should be able to see? If alpaca.ai were to move forward and we had to think about profit, I’d be curious to look into a Freemium model that encourages purchasing the premium version or some version of ads, rather than profiting off selling data. That totally goes against the warm, trustworthy mascot that is our alpaca! It would be a bummer to have such an inviting, harmless front that actually sells your data in the fine print.
What I know now + going forward
As mentioned earlier, I feel much more assured in my abilities as a Figma designer. I’ve also learned how to critically examine my own behaviors and feel more empowered to change them in the future. Maybe I will find a way to stop my doom scrolling before bed and procrastinating studying for exams!
I also feel like the class did a great job digging into the implications of what we build as designers, not just how to build things. The ethics cases we discussed all felt relevant, and I don’t think a week went by when I wasn’t thinking about the “what could happen?” as we iterated on our projects.
Thanks to the teaching team and to my team for a lovely quarter!
