Reflecting on my quarter
What I did
My team and I reinvented what it means to text back with a new interface where we present messages as a once-a-day story summary. We hoped to change the bad habit of leaving people on read, or worse yet, just letting messages continue to pile up completely unaddressed.
Behind the beautiful mockups shown at the end-of-quarter presentation was a whole lot of hidden work that both benefitted my personal education as a designer and the rigorous process that went into Textie. It was a whirlwind of interviewing, user observation, diary studies, mapping, wireframing, brainstorming, pivoting, pixel-pushing, animating, and presenting.
Before and after taking this class…
A highlight of the course was the ethics discussions. Before this class, I (naively) thought ethics in product design was fairly straightforward. There are good decisions and bad ones. It’s should be simple as: let’s not make the bad ones, right?
Learning more formal ways of thinking through different frameworks helped me to see deeper into the responsibilities of the designer in making moral choices for their users—and potentially even for society at large. The act of endeavoring to change behavior itself is an ethical challenge. What behaviors deserve changing? What does it mean for a behavior to be good? How can we assert that we know how others should conduct their lives?
Raising questions like that early is something I know I’ll take with me because we see everyday the effects of poor ethical foresight in designed artifacts. Algorithmic rabbit holes, addictive design patterns, and more are frequently the product of just forgetting to talk about ethics rather than intentional wrongdoing. We can prevent crises later on after it’s too late to renege on a project by thinking about what might go wrong now. With both the formal theories CS247B covered in addition to the general idea of pre-mortem discussion, I now have toolkit for being proactive rather than reactive in ethical design.
Reacting to challenges in the future
CS247B was a class of pivots at every stage. One of the biggest hiccups we had was when our intervention for the second study actually failed (in fact making our participants’ experience with messaging worse)
Our team was super excited about the direction of that intervention and was already dreaming up ways it might be realized in a digital product. But we had to not get attached to our original idea and move forward with what the findings our users surprised us with. Expect to have your plans upended—and embrace the failures when they come. In retrospect, I think our final solution was better for the pivot we took, and coming up with it wouldn’t have been possible without a willingness to face the evidence and move on. In fact, in the future I will be actively observing for signs to pivot by validating our hypothesis and design assumptions at every step rather than just moving forward as though it’s still correct.
And a final note: a massive thank you to my project team, the course teaching team, and my peers in this class for being instructive, inspiring, understanding, and of course super creative during another Zoom quarter!
