I’m a coterm in HCI, but I did AI for my undergrad. I’m no Figma girly, I’m no designer, and I really don’t love being PM in group projects. Despite all of that, I decided to do the HCI concentration for my coterm because I felt I didn’t interact enough with people in my other classes – there just wasn’t enough emphasis on individual users in AI, and I wanted to learn about how to design with users in mind.
Before this class, I really wasn’t a fan of interviewing, needfinding, or anything like that. I’m still not, but at least I understand different techniques for when a forty-five minute interview isn’t ideal. Despite my interview-aversion, I actually really enjoyed looking at the results of all of our studies. I loved seeing how many of my friends (unknowingly) lied during their pre-study interviews, and how the baseline and intervention studies provided so much information about different habits.
In this class, I really enjoyed taking a topic that I liked and researching/designing a solution. I also loved working with my team to figure out features, designs, and interactions. I would have liked to actually build it, but maybe that’s just because I prefer coding to Figma. I will admit, however, that I sometimes don’t fully appreciate the design process. I know how important branding/mood boards/style tiles are, but I think I’m too impatient to specialize in this part of the process, and I would be better suited for the coding side.
When I look back on this class, I think I’ll remember the countless interviews and studies I performed on my friends. I think that this was the most valuable (and tedious) part of this course for me, because I realized that I am most interested in idea generation/ideation and coding, but not the intermediate steps. After this class, yes, I do feel capable, but I do not anticipate being in a non-software role in my future.
I also really liked the ethics discussions for this class. I feel very strongly that CS students need more real-world ethics studies, so I really appreciate how this class (and my other HCI classes) had so much of a focus on discussions. I still think about the unintended consequences paper every time I infinitely scroll on my phone (which is a lot).
In our project, we relied less on reminders and nudging, and more on the combination of intrinsic motivation and social dynamics. Because our app is challenge-based and relies on being on a team, we believe our users consent to these social dynamics by joining and choosing a challenge. We did have concerns around users who struggle with a sense of competition, especially surrounding comparisons to others and poor sportsmanship. We have a feature for a team leader to remove someone from a team, so we hoped that this would help with regulating poor sportsmanship. We didn’t have any safeguards around preventing harmful attitudes around challenges, but we hoped that the social aspects of this app, especially its emphasis on teamwork with friends, would encourage users to interact with teammates in positive ways outside the app.
We acknowledge that the nature of our app is not entirely inclusive and that fitness apps are generally targeted toward able-bodied people. If we had more time, we would have wanted to include a filter to our activity portion where users can select only certain types of activities. Right now, there is no option for someone with limited mobility in their legs to avoid having “going on a run” be suggested, which could be harmful and exclusive.
However, through our design process, we tried to be inclusive regarding different opinions on health and exercise. We wanted to accommodate users with various beliefs about what exercise consists of, and we wanted to prevent having any “health metrics” such as calories burnt, since health is a lot more complicated than that. We wanted to provide metrics that were helpful for users without being harmful. With our team’s background in athletics, we wanted to be considerate of users who may have issues with overtraining, disordered eating, body image issues, and other fitness related issues.
Over the course of this class, my thinking has evolved such that now I better understand the design process, and I see how easy it is to bring outsiders into the process. It was so valuable to do so many studies and usability tests. I also realized how important it is to consider different fields when designing for HCI. Including psychological principles was very important (especially since our focus was on behavior change), and it’s important to consider various frameworks when attempting to design something that will impact a person’s life in various ways.
Next time, I will focus more on the different models and system maps. I think that creating all of those made it super simple to create the flow of our project, and it was very easy to get in the mind of our intended audience when we created the path diagram and iceberg models. I really enjoyed this project, especially since I got to choose a topic I’m interested in and take into consideration the opinions of my friends. While I may not be an interview-loving HCI girly, I still like developing ideas and creating something from scratch. All this to say: maybe I don’t like interacting with people, but at least I can design for them.
