Before this class, I’d only taken two other HCI classes; CS 247G, Game Design, and CS 147, the Intro to the HCI series. While a lot of the HCI courses teach the design and user thinking models, this class really dived into the user experience/researcher aspect of design and I really enjoyed that. It made me a more well-rounded designer as I felt like I lack some understanding, or just more in-depth knowledge about research when it came to approaching new situations.
I really loved that we got to do so much in terms of research and really understand the process before we even touch the app. However, that also meant we had to learn so much in a short amount of time–which is mostly true for Stanford courses. It could also make the material feel repetitive as we’re learning about all the ways to do something. I definitely will use personas again; I felt like that was a very useful way to condense information from what we interviewed. Sometimes, there was just too much information to sift through and personas do a good job of bringing that down. Although I see the importance of the circle map, it was super confusing and took me a bit to understand (and I don’t think I would use it again since it takes me a bit to even find the correct outer labels).
I was surprised about our solution not because I didn’t like it but because I was out sick the day our team decided on what we should do. It definitely was extreme, but I didn’t expect myself to go for it considering the fact that I usually like doing the easy thing or things that fit within the scope/ box. The solution was definitely extreme, but that was also what interested me the most. I’m glad I got to trust my teammates with the idea because it brought me out of my comfort zone in solution generation. However, the problem that emerged was definitely one that stems from how polarizing our concept was. We got a lot of feedback from people from the science fair that it would be hard to people to even bet money to begin with and to further that, gamble with political parties. People were concerned about this app’s concept to further political polarization and that was something we were also concerned about too. Currently, this issue is unresolved, but I do envision a solution that political parties are a component of the app, but not necessarily the core theme.
This HCI class gave me more insight into how we can gather information on users, especially in the case where I want to go into an industry that works with users and builds products based on society. In terms of more concrete relations between my project and my other work, not really. I think this class was just a way to keep building my skills as a user researcher and designer for future projects to come. Some important things I would keep in mind as I keep growing are ethical design and designing for accessibility. These are still some topics in the tech industry that we need to cover and a must if we want to continue to create inclusive spaces for all our audience and not just a select few.
I wonder if we could’ve tackled something a bit more niche compared to keeping focus, as this is a huge market, supersaturated with a plethora of ideas. This was also another reason why we decided to be a bit more extreme with our solution as it wasn’t really seen done before during our research period. The concept of our project is more manipulative in my opinion as we use guilt or fear to encourage behavior since our idea is so extreme. It definitely intended to scare users to make sure they stay on task or else they donate to the opposing political party. We had this idea when we did our research and a similar app, Forest, will only plant trees when you complete your Pomodoro. We just took our app in the other direction where we cause chaos in failure rather than reward during successes.
Currently, our app has little to no political privacy. For folks who don’t want to reveal their political affiliations in these times, they might find it hard to use our app or avoid our app in general. For the future, I wonder if we can still incorporate the political aspect of the application, but make that information private to lower the bar of entry into the app.
After taking this class, I’m confident to say that I’m a lot more equipped with user knowledge than before. It is super helpful as I continue into my professional life but also to be more critical of existing or incoming products into society and how we can think about things with more nuanced lenses. And next time I’m faced with a similar situation, I would use what I learned in this class to create a product that I’m proud of making.
