Behavior change is extremely tough and tricky. I knew that before coming into this class. I had struggled for years to change some of my own behaviors (and mostly failed). I took this class because I was curious to see how one can apply the principles we’re taught in an HCI class in the context of something as complicated as behavior.
My doubts started to fade away as the needfinding approach made it very easy to sympathize with the users and really understand how they operate (and why they do what they do). Chatting with them and getting deeper insights allowed us to identify why they were facing certain issues. This was pivotal in helping us pinpoint what could help them. Talking to people and conducting interviews was definitely my favorite part of the process. Because of class interviews, I also picked up some great tips and tricks that I will continue to use in the future. Since I really enjoyed interviewing, I naturally had a lot of fun working on the grounded theory and proto-personas. It made me feel closer to the users and allowed me to ensure each decision for our project was taken with our core users in mind. While the literature review was fun to do, I am still not fully sure how it connected to our final project.
I wanted to step out of my comfort zone in this class – I do not consider myself to be a very creative person, and so I decided to work on the design fiction. The process was definitely not easy, I had plenty of back and forth with the teaching team and it felt like I spent hours on the deliverable, but it was all worth it in the end. I immensely appreciate the support the teaching team provided as they helped me come up with something that I am very proud of and this experience is one that will stay with me for years to come.
(The cover of our design fiction)
Working on this project also gave me time to introspect and look into my own friendships at Stanford (as I get ready to graduate soon). It reminded me to be mindful of my interactions – and that alone was very helpful for me.
As we wrapped up our project and the class, the best feeling was when during the project showcase, we had 2 testers (who also happened to be from our target audience) actually engage in a very organic (and meaningful and long) conversation using our prompts. This gave us confidence that we were building something of value!
I really appreciate how there were these “deadlines” set by the teaching team for project milestones. I have been in quite a few project classes where lack of such structure ends up leading to a situation where there is so much left to do right before the final deadline – this not only causes undue stress but also leads to a final deliverable that is low in quality.
Moving onto ethical considerations – while we do not collect any personal information as such, users do have their journal entries saved on the app and these can contain sensitive and personal information. There is definitely going to be a need for ensuring that this information is stored in a secure and well encrypted way before the app is available to users. Our users would be trusting us with their deepest thoughts and it is our responsibility to ensure they are safe.
I also believe that we do a good job at not manipulating our users in any way. By chatting with our target audience and assessing our competitors, we realized that the process of maintaining/creating friendships has a very personal aspect to it (and therefore we decided against being a social app). At the moment, we do not plan to send any push notifications or nudges to the user (apart from probably asking if they want to journal once they open the app and they haven’t journaled that day/since a few days).
Lastly, I do acknowledge that showing progress can lead to users trying to gamify it (and not be honest with themselves) and that is what we have depicted in our design fiction – to give people some food for thought.
Armed with knowledge from this class, I now believe that if the correct approach is followed and user needs are obsessed over (in the right way of course), it is very possible to build a good and useful product of any kind. This learning is something I will keep in mind as I work on building different products in the future as well (for classes or my work). I now fully understand the value of iterating and constantly testing – the journey to a valuable product is not as straightforward as it looks, there is a lot of back and forth that ensures that user needs are met in the most effective way possible.
I am confident that I would not be intimidated the next time I am asked to design/help design a product and for me, that is a huge win.
(Attaching a super cute selfie as a shoutout to team Needlefish 🙂 )
