CS247I Class Reflection

Intro

I thoroughly enjoyed this class and I felt like I learned a lot. The class effectively taught that there are multiple mediums in which a concept can be presented and taught for the purposes of understanding. From the explorable explainer to the website to the serious game, each project taught valuable skills about needfinding, visual design, user testing, and much more. Meanwhile, it was valuable and enriching to have the continuity of the electoral politics theme throughout the quarter and to see how our groups’ specific topics evolved throughout the project iterations.

Project Breakdown

With each project, there were new challenges and elements to take into consideration in terms of how to best help people understand complexity. For example, with the explorable explainer, my group and I had to work think long and hard about how to best get our audience interested in the issue and how to present the material that would best suit our purposes. Since our target audience was first-time absentee voters, and specifically college students, we decided to format our explorable explainer around an interface that confused college students would be familiar with: the Google search engine.

For the website, my group and I had to consider the best way to present our information and articles such that the user could intuitively navigate our website. For this, it was helpful to look at other websites that presented similar information or types of information and look at how their website was formatted. The cardsorting activity was also super informative and eye-opening about how different people categorize and think about information.

For the serious game, much thought and testing went into every single decision we made in the game design process. Above all else, my group and I really discovered the value of playtesting our game. We could discuss and debate certain decisions in the game mechanics and game design all we wanted, but at the end of the day, the only really useful information came from all the playtesting we did at every iteration of the game. We also constantly struggled with balancing a fun and engaging experience for the player, but also effectively communicate our takeaway message to them. In our early iterations, my group’s game clearly communicated our message, perhaps too obviously, but most of our work was put towards adding fun and complexity to the game. By the end, I feel like our game’s fun aspects may have overpowered our message, but at least our players were enjoying their experience and willing to play the game multiple times. My favorite project by far was this last project. I thoroughly enjoyed designing a game and seeing how diverse all of our games were on the last day of class.

Improvements

In terms of how the class could improve, I feel like there was a lot of confusion at the beginning of the class as to what the three projects were going to look like and what exactly was being asked of us at each deadline. I feel like this could be greatly helped if, on the first day of class, a large scope overview could be presented with specific examples of each project from past quarters. Also, it’d be helpful to have a full quarter schedule of rough dates and deadlines in the syllabus since that wasn’t released to us until much later in the quarter.

Also, I feel like some of the material would have been much more effectively taught by actively doing the concepts rather than being lectured about them, such as the visual design principles. With the nature of the material we were learning, I felt like class time could have been better spent by working on the concepts in groups and incorporating them into our projects rather than sitting through lectures.

Overall, with this class as well as CS 147, I felt like we did not have enough time to thoroughly and completely finish the projects, especially the serious games project. I would have loved to have a few more weeks on each of the projects to incorporate even more user testing and product iterations just to make the project the best it could be, but I understand with the nature of the quarter system, this is almost impossible to rectify.

Conclusion

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this class and felt like I actually learned a lot of skills that will help me in the work that I want to go into. Thank you for such an amazing and fun class!