This was my second 247 class, following CS247A, which I took in the fall quarter and loved. I thought this class would be more of the same, but it was quite different, which I welcome because it kept the whole experience fresh. What 247A did extremely well in my opinion was fostering an inviting and fun environment for great conversation; genuinely, everyone in the class felt like good friends having a dialogue.
I think part of this is that this class felt like it had more deliverables than 247A overall, so extra team time has been necessary, which comes at the expense of more lectures and full-class discussions. As a result, the first half of the class felt much more discussion-heavy, but since then, we have been quite laser-focused on our deliverables (which I think is necessary given the magnitude of our project). I have enjoyed the second half of the course much more than the first half of the course because it has been great working with our team, and I think our project could end up being special. I also wish that the class fostered a better environment for more respectful and nuanced discussion.
What has made this class for me is that I feel very close to my team and have enjoyed every moment with them, which is wonderful. I feel that 247 classes are nothing without a great team that you enjoy working with and spending time with. With 247B, I enjoyed that we got to choose at least one person from our team, because it allowed me to work with someone who was on my team in the fall, and we enjoyed working together and have had a great quarter in 247B!
Taking this class after 247A was the correct move because B is much more focused in scope than A: in A our final projects were allowed to be out there (for instance my group ‘created’ a satellite that would track campus and recommend artworks and installation locations to student artists), but B takes the same project and focuses it to an application. I was slightly confused at first because it feels like the project requirements (e.g. clickable prototype) steer everyone towards the direction of a mobile app, which makes for fewer dark horse/wild project ideas, but gives us another great chance to work on our UI design skills. I think it could have been fun to design a VR or wearable app (only UI of course) but I think Figma truly lends itself to mobile development above all else.
On the subject of ethical considerations, I think our app overall is successful at being respectful and understanding that everyone has a different exercise journey. Overall, our nudges are relatively benign as well. We use group challenges to spur users to work together as teams to achieve abstract goals, which introduces some gamification. Also, we provide users with recommended exercises to ensure a knowledge gap that leads to consistent routines. Both of these are net positives. In our design fiction, we explore the idea that people become too fixated on exercising, which, in turn, compromises their health. This is the biggest ethical consideration of our app. Too much gamification could easily cause users to lose sight of the long-term nature of an exercise routine and the importance of starting slowly to prevent injury.
Our app also is not tremendously accessible in that most of the group goals are centered around distance running/walking, lifting, cycling, and swimming. For this reason, our app does not consider the universal user. However, it would be effective for the average active person. It is probably impossible to make a fully inclusive app when your focus is exercise, so the best we can do in my opinion is to provide flexibility for users of different skill levels. This our app does well. Our exercise recommendation feature is intended to scale along with perceived user experience, only recommending what is safe and healthy for users.
Due to the nature of our app having social elements, privacy is a difficult discussion. The core user data at stake will be user data, and if we wanted to improve user privacy on that front, we could allow users to keep some of their logged exercises private. I feel that private workouts defeat the purpose of the app of working together as a team. Perhaps in the case of privacy concerns over workout data, another exercise application like Apple Health might be a better choice for a user. In our app, users can log what they want and when they want, and we do not require any personal identifying information apart from a name and a phone number/contacts, the ladder of which is being used to find your friends who already use the app.
Overall the ethics of behavior change within the context of HCI are fascinating. When we design, should we focus on one “power user”, or particular demographic? Or, should we try to make our app as accessible as possible? In the context of the exercise app space, these questions become even more difficult. We could make our app pretty useful for a lot of people or amazingly useful for fewer people. Where does a designer draw the line? This is something that I want to explore more in the future. With our app, Ignite, team Nighthawks wants to cater to people within the band of intermediate levels of experience, but everyone has different relationships with exercise. For this reason, I do not think our app has a very universal or inclusive design unfortunately. I recognize that we chose a difficult space but I think that we did our best to make a product with as positive a potential impact as possible and that it could/would be very effective for the target audience.
