Before this class, the design process seemed tedious and frustrating. With my only prior design experience being CS147, the experience of interviewing, needfinding, designing, iterating, revising, etc. all seemed bogged down with too many deliverables that were too focused on the minutia. I found it difficult to engage with the work I was doing for the sake of the work, more focused on trying to meet a rubric than trying to get anything out of the experience. Despite that, I was strongly interested in taking this course – some of the whispers of what the 247 series is like had made its way to me, and the cross-listing with Symbolic Systems (oh, my beloved undergraduate major) was exciting. The topic, in particular, was interesting to me – my concentration in Symbolic Systems was “Decision Making and Rationality” (DMAR). I was very excited to take a class toward my master’s degree in HCI that seemed to marry my CS and symbolic systems (aka psychology, economics, and biology) interests.
This class allowed me to focus more on the experiences of what I was doing with far less stress about whether I was doing them “perfectly to the letter”, giving me much more space to breathe. In particular, I got much more comfortable reaching out to users and both conducting and designing interviews and studies. I was only familiar with need-finding interviews, heuristic testing, and usability tests. Diary studies were new to me, as were intervention studies. I found the class’s cadence to make a lot of sense, though I didn’t always feel like I understood where we were going next (or why we were going in the order we were going) until we had already finished the next assignment. A lot of elements of this course made sense in retrospect. As I consider everything we covered in this course, I think some of the key elements I will take with me as I move into industry are how to engage with users (which I learned both from conducting my interviews and from observing my group members’ work) and the underlying theories of how habits are formed. Measuring Me in particular is something that stuck with me, helping me understand much more of my behaviors through brute observation.
Pictured above: a card I saw in a store that reminded me of this class (and of my own attempts to change my behavior that don’t always work out)
The topic that my group fixed resonates with me as someone who is about to graduate and is friends with many people who have already graduated (including my long-distance partner). Something I certainly noticed was the challenges to my expectations and assumptions that I learned about myself in this class. Understanding how to design for your users and not for what you think your users are like is extremely important; I did not grasp how hard it is to separate those two concepts until working on this project.
Regarding the process of this project, I am pleased with how it went overall. I thoroughly enjoyed my team members, though I think we all fell victim to a busy quarter outside this class. While I did feel more comfortable branching out into some new territory, I wish I had expanded slightly more into new things – in particular, gaining experience with Figma. While school is the time to learn new things, I find it difficult to motivate myself to learn new skills when other people in my team are more adept at them than I am and can produce better results much quicker than I would have. I like to take pride in my work; I wish I felt more comfortable and confident in my time and in the learning process to explore (and likely fail) more elements of our project.
The embedded ethics curriculum in this course was very effective, and I particularly enjoyed the questions we asked about well-being. I am always shocked by the overwhelming ideology I hear from some of my peers that “my app will make things better”. In my opinion, examining that is critical to understanding not only how you are affecting the world (for better or worse), but also how your solution actually works. It is likely the DMAR in me, always pulling me towards psychology and human behavior. Thinking about our solution, tend, I have many questions about the stress that came up for many of our users in our intervention study. While our actual solution would use passive reminders instead of explicit notifications as nudges, the image of a friendship “literally” dying is one of our main forms of nudging – and it is not exactly a kind one, at that. While malicious manipulation is not something I am as concerned about (especially since the app is mostly encouraging offline behavior), I think this poses a huge well-being question to our users. Our solution could add undue tension to individuals, friendships, and broader social dynamics – in many ways, time is zero-sum, and spending more time with one person often means spending less time with someone else. Disrupting the balance that people have found in their daily lives is not necessarily a good thing, even if it means they strengthen some of their friendships. As I think about working on this project further, I would want to do more long-term user and/or intervention studies that focus on the effects of this app over a longer period of time, considering not only friendship strength but also overall well-being.
Regarding privacy, we eventually landed on a manual logging mode for our users. However, something we were considering (and mostly sidelined for feasibility reasons for this class) is the idea of tracking texts/calls to gauge the quality of interactions. While it would provide convenience for some users, it would also require a huge amount of trust from users. To protect users’ privacy (defining privacy as control of information), we would need to implement much stronger security measures to prevent private messages from being leaked or abused. As it stands now, however, much more minimal data privacy protection measures need to be enacted – while we would want to protect user privacy of the names of friendships and frequency of interaction, there is far less sensitive information contained in the logging of texts/calls/in-person interactions with someone (with no indication of content) than there is in the actual combing through of said texts and calls.
This course taught me plenty about the underlying theory behind habits and behaviors, as well as how to truly explore and enjoy the design process. I find many of these steps much more manageable, and I appreciated the business lens that Christina provided in class. I also have many more tools regarding how to examine my work – critiquing it using new ethical terminology, examining my ideas visually (oh, Sketchnotes, how you rewired my understanding of visual hierarchy and layout), and new methods for how to effectively communicate to a user through interviews, interview processing, and design choices.
Pictured above: the first storyboard I’ve made that i have a) been proud of my cartooning – thank you, Deb Aoki! – and b) felt like my layout made sense and actually told a story
When I consider work in design in the future, I will be more equipped to think through my decisions from a deeper perspective of “Did the code work?”. While I will work as a software engineer rather than a PM or designer in particular, I understand that everything I will be working on is designed in some way – a system design, a user interface design, a company hierarchy design, etc. These design choices all have distinct implications on privacy, autonomy, and well-being, and I need to explore these implications by examining the design choices themselves, understanding the stakeholders, and engaging with the affected parties directly – something I now have much more ease doing. Even outside of the official role of “designer”, asking these questions is important and something I will prioritize.
