Before taking this class, I was trying to figure out whether I wanted to be a designer or an engineer. Through the assignments and lectures in this class, I was able to get a more realistic understanding of what a designer does day to day, which was really important in helping me direct where I want my future career to land. There were some parts of the class that I really loved, and those were mainly the artistic parts: the mood boards, style tiles, and sketchy screens, for example. There were other parts that felt tedious to me, such as user interviews and long write-ups. I think this turned out very much as I expected, where I enjoyed the more UX design components more than the UX research. I think what surprised me the most actually was how interested I was in the ethics readings. I am often someone to end up skimming readings for classes, but I found myself really invested in both the habit building explorations and ethics articles. Because of this, I feel I learned a ton in this area and developed my own thoughts on these matters.
In our project, we thought a lot about privacy and nudging. Some of the biggest issues with current posture products are invasions of privacy, like constant webcam access, or intrusive and frequent nudging. We thought hard about how to design a product that respected users’ privacy and didn’t distract them, but was still effective. Through this and through discussions in class, I felt I revised my views on nudging. I used to feel nudging was almost always in some way manipulative or bad, kind of like an advertisement pulling your attention away. During the quarter, I learned a better way to draw a line, though perhaps a blurry one, between what is a good nudge and a bad one. This is by asking key questions, like did the user consent to this notification and is the user benefitting from this notification. Therefore, in some cases, nudges can actually be a positive thing from a design perspective. There is a lot more nuance to it than I originally thought, and there is a possibility to make product decisions that benefit both a company’s business goals and their users’ experience.
I often create my own apps and games for fun as it is a hobby of mine, and I will continue to take into consideration the ethics discussions we had in this class as I move forward. In fact, right now, I am working on adding notifications to my word game app Braided to remind users that the new daily puzzle has been released. I am doing this after my friend’s suggestion since he, as a user, said he enjoyed playing but simply forgets to check. I am being very careful in my design as I do this to make sure that the user gives consent initially and can very easily turn these notifications off or customize them to appear at a time that they would like. As I continue to add new features to my current apps, make new projects, or develop products in my career, I am promising myself now that I will stay vigilant of the ethical effects of what I am making.
