I generally enjoy HCI classes at Stanford and going through the design process with a team, and feel like this class met the expectations I had. Overall I appreciate that we had a supportive teaching team and feel like the feedback we got helped bring our project forward.
I do feel some loss of opportunity around the class because I feel like it was really easy to put on the backburner due to the flexibility it offered. While I really appreciated this format in a stressful quarter, I think it made it a bit difficult to get all four team members on the same page sometimes. I think this may be less of an issue if the individual assignments took up less space in the beginning of the quarter and were more related to the work we did. I think the weeks I appreciated the most were the weeks where we all did individual brainstorming (via an individual project assignment) then came together to share our parts. I feel like this made our team meetings extremely productive and improved our quality of work as well. I think an assignment structure that might work well for the class is making the monday assignment an individual project assignment, then combining the sketchnote and ethics portion for the wednesday assignment.
The main thing I would have liked more in this class is a little bit more handholding on making sure our project maintained the integrity of our previous findings and work. While I think this would be difficult to accomplish as it would require someone to closely keep track of all of the work we’d done, I think a lot of our initial ideas that I was looking forward to incorporating got a bit lost as the assignments went on. None of the features that we storyboarded were incorporated into our prototype, so it felt somewhere along the way there was a major shift in our project without us necessarily intending to go that way. This might be due to the fact that our team had some confusion around the usability testing assignment, and we might have remade our MVP features under different synthesis.
The one thing I really enjoyed in the class was the ethics discussion and going through different UX techniques for the first half of the class with random people. I feel like this was a really new experience for me in HCI classes, as there was never a lot of collaborative work with other people in the class who were not teammates. I also loved walking through and seeing all of the other teams’ prototypes and projects, and thought it was really fun to interact with everyone during project critique
I will also say the highlight of the class for me was the Deb lecture, and was what I’ll remember most in 10 years! I loved making the storymaps and doing different UX doodles, and am inspired to try and improve that skill.
Overall, hank you to the teaching team for doing a great job running the class, and for making it an entertaining one!
