I came into this class thinking I was well versed in the design process. I had taken CS 147, won 2nd best project overall, and was a course assistant for CS 147 this past fall. However, this class forced me to confront the design process from a completely different angle. Without the guide rails of CS 147, my team and I were forced to make crucial design decisions with limited data and without much assistance. I was surprised that I loved this experience and feel like I learned a lot about real design experience, chiefly that you can never get enough practice on these methods.
I loved the visual design lectures and interactive activities. Those contributed directly to my project and my learning. I didn’t enjoy the user architecture activities that we did around week 5 and 6. This tells me that I prefer the physical design aspects more than the user research/experience work.
What worked for me was the routine of the class. The class and its activities flowed very well. However, I found it difficult for the class to get into a true flow because some of the lectures felt disconnected. I thought some of the content around week 5 and 6 could have been shortened so that the flow of the project lectures could be more streamlined. Also, I was disappointed that we didn’t get to view other teams’ projects in class. I was looking forward to the project fair all quarter and the fact that it was 3 minutes long really was a bummer. Maybe cutting the lecture content for Week 10 Thursday and having it be mostly project fair is a viable alternative here.
Ten years from now, I’ll remember how to conduct user studies and conduct a successful intervention. These are great techniques for my career in design.
The design and behavior change techniques I learned in this class will help me outside of the design world as well. In my own life, I’ll work on kicking some of the bad habits I’ve developed while in college and helping others around me work on kicking their bad habits. I look forward to applying these behavior change techniques at scale as I move forward in the workplace.
Looking at the ethics questions, I think it’s good practice to reflect on Hook’d and how we lived up to proper ethical standards, and also could find room for improvement.
Through gentle nudges and visual cues (health bars, physical fish appearance), our app encourages users to stay in touch with close friends/family. These are acceptable nudges because they are non-intrusive prompts that don’t force action. However, if we had decided to pressure users with excessive notifications or guilt-inducing messaging, it could become manipulative, especially for users with social anxiety or those needing digital breaks. As we talked about in our final write up, striking the balance between passive nudge and active usership is difficult, but we think we implemented an effective and ethical solution.
On privacy, we respect users’ privacy by only accessing contacts with explicit permission, not storing unnecessary personal data, and allowing users to control notifications and interactions. Our definition of privacy focuses on user control over personal information. Future risks could be third-party data sharing, since users can link 3rd party apps to enhance the experience on Hook’d. To prevent this, we would ensure transparency and provide enhanced privacy controls.
