Before this class, I thought the course was largely going to be a design course in the traditional software engineering design sense with ways to change behavior digitally, but the class took a much more psychological approach than I expected, which I found useful and got me operating outside my comfort zone a bit, which I think will be good for me in the long run. I specifically really liked the variety of techniques that were presented when it came to fostering behavior change, and I appreciated the emphasis on the key idea that an intervention isn’t necessarily a failure if it doesn’t cause a behavior change– or an intended behavior change. Especially in Silicon Valley, we often live by the mantra “move fast and break things”, act first and think later, and this class (especially with the amount of preparation work and build-up assignments towards our final intervention) really, and I mean really illustrated this idea. Though some may have seen it as a lot of busy work, I generally found most assignments useful and eye-opening in introducing a new concept, I especially really liked the drawing related assignments (specifically the sketchy screens and behavioral personas, I thought those were applicable and also fun). I like how the class was much more application based than theoretically based, and Professor Christina generally did a great job of explaining concepts in this light.
A lot of the branding stuff we did (the exercises on identifying different companies via branding, exploring style tiles, mood boards, etc.) I think these are all things I can use again in my own work, especially in scenarios where I am building a front-end for a company or for a personal project; these branding decisions are something I had never really thought about before and I am glad I did now. I appreciated the constant highlighting of user privacy as well, and specifically putting “Terms and Conditions” or information screens on a login page. Even these little design choices are still design choices at the end of the day (what color you make your error bars, do you make your buttons squares, circles, or rounded squares, how should we group things, etc.), and I’m glad I got to learn more about that and will definitely to continue that as I move into industry.
Regarding my team collaboration, I feel like the dynamic of my team was mostly pretty solid, as we generally turned in assignments on time and got along, and split work effectively. We were a generally introverted team, but I feel like Professor Christina made it a bit easier on us since she had us constantly doing exercises in class. A lot of these exercises were fun too, requiring drawing or roleplaying, just general ways of allowing us to express our personalities. I compare the class a lot to CS 194W, which I took in my senior year– I feel that class at first did a good job of building team chemistry and allowing teammates to feel comfortable with one another, but by Week 4 onward, they kind of just stop, and it made it hard for me, as my other four teammates were all friends with one another and I felt heavily isolated and my ideas meant nothing to my teammates. This did not happen at all in CS 247B which I am grateful for, though in honesty this could just be due to the different dynamics of the groups.
There were a few things that did not go so well, specifically while I said that most of the assignments did not feel like busy work / redundant, a few of them certainly did. For instance, the grounded theory report for the baseline study felt extremely pedantic and frustrating due to how insanely structured it had to be. This was at least fixed in the intervention study as things were less structured, which I feel is better since our interviews and intervention studies were all vastly different from each other. I also felt like the readings at first for the sketchnotes were fantastic and I really enjoyed them (I loved the three myths of behavior change as well as the “Thinking Fast and Slow” reading, which was my favorite reading of the quarter by far and was the one I remember the most), but some of the readings later in the quarter felt either repetitive / redundant or used examples that I just couldn’t really relate to at all. (For instance, the “Consistency is for Closers” article I found kind of redundant, and one of the grounding examples they used for a large portion of the article was a romantic partner). Lastly, while I mostly liked the guest speakers and the ethics discussion related things, I wasn’t really a fan of the ethics discussion we had largely because of how unengaging it was relative to the other classes. Prof Christina made a conscientious effort to make all of her classes engaging without cold calling on people, which I feel like is my favorite format for a class generally, and it made me more comfortable speaking up (especially in some of the classes later in the quarter in which I participated more). However I just remember in the ethics discussion there were limited breakout sessions and student engagement, and the difference felt very jarring there. That may just be me though, not sure if other students agree.
There are a few things that I wish I did a bit differently. I was not good about turning in individual assignments in this quarter and showing up to class ON TIME rather than five minutes late, and I wish I was better about that / have some regret about that. I also wish I met more of my classmates outside of my group and got to understand more about their projects. The last two classes we had where we were reviewing each other’s products definitely made me realize this more, and outside of the people I knew previously before the class, I feel like I didn’t really learn that much about other people’s projects other than the ones I was assigned to review. Maybe that could be baked in implicitly or explicitly a little bit more into the class, though given that my peers probably are complaining about a lot of busy work as that is the reputation that this class has, I feel like others may not agree with me on my stance on peer review. Though I think I could have probably been more proactive regarding this.
Overall, I really enjoyed CS 247B and thought it was a very fresh change of scene compared to some of the more AI-centric, lecture-based classes that I usually take. I plan to take CS 247G with Prof Christina next quarter as I really like her teaching style generally (and also the content that course covers), so not totally sure who is reading this, but thank you for reading my reflection!
P.S.: As a sidenote if Ryan is reading this, thank you for being a great section leader / always answering my questions in both section and in class. Good luck to you in the rest of your classes / beyond Stanford and I hope we can stay in touch.
