Individual midterm reflection paper

From VMT

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[edit] Midterm Reflection Paper

by Bryan Aller

This course is completely different from what I had expected when I signed up for it. Having taken INFO 110 (HCI I) just last year and last year being my first year at Drexel University, I had expected INFO 310 to be much like the other courses that I have taken so far within IST. Granted, I haven’t taken all that many INFO courses, but for the most part, they have all followed a similar theme of book-work and quizzes/tests. Having just read the TCA article for this week, I’d have to compare this course more to constructivist approach: bringing a variety of methods together and using “alternative knowledge representations” (page 4 of TCA PDF). The result of this style upon my attitude toward the course has been unsurprisingly positive, as I enjoy being able to learn in a variety of different ways at once. I feel that this helps me to understand the material better.

From a practical perspective, this course makes a lot of sense for me to take right now, just as I am starting my education within IST. Interfaces are possibly the most important pieces of systems … and probably the piece that causes the greatest number of issues within the whole field of study. For this reason, I’ve decided to include it within my core plan of study. I came into the course thinking that it was going to be limited to simply a lot of diagrams and book study; to the contrary, I have been pleasantly surprised by the variety of materials used to reinforce the material: weekly presentations, utilizing the VMT collaborative sessions, maintaining a website, forum postings, class discussion, readings from the book and professional papers, and reflection papers such as this one. The materials are thought-provoking and I find that I spend a lot of time simply thinking about this course and the topics that come up.

I can’t say that I look at interfaces the same way any more. This was something that became especially clear at work. I am currently on co-op right now working in the IT department for a very large technical company, where I see business applications development underway every day. Within the past couple of weeks (which also happens to coincide with the beginning of the term, and hence, this class), I have also had the opportunity to have an impact on the design of some of the interfaces for these applications. When I do testing, I have the opportunity to provide feedback on their design and possible problems that I foresee. Currently, I am also a stakeholder in these applications because my primary job function is to provide technical support for some of these applications as they become available. I handle issues as they come in and I notify the developers of any recurring trends of problems. The problems are then investigated and incorporated into the next iteration of improvements/enhancements for a particular product. I have the unique position of being able to see a wide variety of issues that can occur because these applications are being used by tens of thousands of users, and it’s not surprising how many of the issues are simply related to an inability to understand how the interface is intended to function.

Overall the course is going well for me so far. I have had no difficulty keeping up with the readings, Blackboard postings, and group work. The readings are interesting and I enjoy the supplementary professional papers. The Blackboard postings are a good way to review the material that I have just read; however, I get a lot more out of responding to other people’s posts than I do in simply posting what I think. Also, maintaining a website for the class is a neat idea and I enjoy web design; this is the first class that I have had to do this for. This is also the first class in which I have had the opportunity to do collaborative work in an online environment. It is a new and unique experience for me, which was at first quite frustrating. I had some trouble adjusting to the lack of additional human feedback (gestures, being able to speak, facial expressions) as well as some of the new issues that come up in the group environment (overwriting other people’s work, trying to distribute work, etc.). However, now that I have the hang of it and my group members have adapted as well, we are able to make the most of what the tool has to offer. As far as group work goes, I feel that there has been a lot of progress and I am very surprised at how well things are working.

I think part of why our group functions so well is the environment and intentions with which our group was formed. The fact that the academic focus of the class is about collaboration and that the structure of the assignments/tool is oriented for collaboration has a psychological impact on how I (and probably much of the rest of the class) respond. If I was working with this particular group of students in another class on a different set of assignments, I have a feeling that we might work together differently. However, in the psychological context of this course, we are making this work; I’m still trying to figure out why, because if I can understand I can carry it over into other courses. Typically I find group work frustrating for the reasons that I get stuck with a lot of the work and my group mates are not focused on the task at hand. Remarkably, I’ve come to enjoy group work as a result of the assignments that we have done in this class and this particular group is currently working out well. I’m hoping that it stays that way.

Our group composition would, in other circumstances, be difficult for me to handle. Normally, I take leadership over the group and have to provide direction for how the work is supposed to be handled. I run into opposition from group members, either because they do not wish to work or they have opposing viewpoints. I try to mediate between all of the members to minimize conflict and maximize productivity, and I pick my group members accordingly. In this particular case, one of my group members is extremely outspoken and has appointed himself as the leader. During class time, he is obnoxiously loud and his comments rub me the wrong way, as they are often contrary to my beliefs or they are the cause of conflict within the class. This particular group member chose me for his group, and, chances are, if I had the opportunity to pick the group composition, I would have tried to avoid having to work with him because I feel that our personalities are in conflict. Interestingly enough, it turns out that he lives on my floor and our views actually complement each other very well. When we chose roles, I presented myself as the communicator, and that’s exactly how I happen to be functioning right now. As the leader, he has a lot of great ideas and is good at figuring out who should be doing what and how. However, sometimes he has difficulty getting these ideas across to the rest of the group. Since I typically play a leader role myself, I know where he is coming from, and since I have experience working with followers, I act as a bridge between the two. Our leader presents himself as “a leader out of impatience”, which is quite accurate, so I often find myself arbitrating his decisions/behavior to allow room for other ideas from the rest of the group. Fortunately, his impatience can also be of benefit to the group, because he combines it with certain confidence and a desire to get things done, which means that we don’t have to spend a lot of time deliberating which path to take. Typically, I would have a hard time dealing with someone like him because he is so outspoken and sometimes our views don’t agree, but we have been able to make that work positively for our group.

Another of my group members does not like to speak much, so we give him some preference over which sections he wishes to present or we find other ways to get him involved, capitalizing on his technical skills and skills as a designer. He also has a very busy schedule (as we all do), so it was very important for us to establish a set meeting time early on to recur every week. He doesn’t say much, but when he does he is able to speak effectively and his ideas make sense, although he has a tendency to focus too much on technical aspects and not on the social network aspect. That’s where the “leader” and I come in, acting as mediators and rat-hole watchers (a term that I became familiar with from page 304 in the book). Our final group member is in some ways the opposite of this one. He sometimes loses focus in the opposite direction of the technical end of the spectrum, enjoys speaking and often takes on communicative roles, but he sometimes has difficulties effectively communicating his thoughts. As a group we provide constructive feedback to one another and have become comfortable receiving this feedback. In a way, I would like to think that we are both consciously and subconsciously fine-tuning our group composition and behavior so that we work together more efficiently. By using this feedback to change our behavior within the group, we become more amenable to one another and improve our work habits. I look at this as an iterative design process in itself; we are designing our group to interface with the rest of the class and for the internal components to function as a whole.

As far as group work goes, we make compromises and ultimately are able to decide together as a group what is best for everyone. As a group these compromises have extended so far as to modify the original role structure to be more flexible. We decided originally as a class to break down into four specific categories, which I believe were too restricting, since each member of our group exemplified qualities that could fall into each of the categories to different degrees. In its stead, we have opted for more blurred boundaries and we handle the workload based on preferences and what we are interested in helping out with from week to week. The breakdown of roles for each group session and presentation varies. So far we have met each week in the VMT at a predetermined time and created a room to brainstorm our approach for the coming week. Our compiled ideas evolve over the course of the session and then we break off to perform whatever tasks we have determined are necessary, whether this be the creation of slides on a certain topic, diagrams, explanations, development of use cases, etc. We share resources and new developments via e-mail, and we have exchanged phone numbers so that we can contact one another if additional meeting times are necessary. Once our rough drafts are completed, we e-mail them out to the whole group for review; at this point we also discuss who will compile the drafts together. Once the drafts have been compiled we all proof the compilation and determine what else needs to be done for it to be of final draft quality. Then we determine who will cover which sections in the class presentation, leaving leeway for additional comments as we see fit. To be truly honest, this additional content isn’t always something that we plan beforehand. Sometimes we have comments that we wish to script in, yet we do not discourage thoughts that may occur on-the-spot. This behavior has simply evolved as the group has grown comfortable with one another and we feel that it is important to the progression of thought. Personally, I don’t believe in stifling ideas. If need be, I am comfortable discussing new ideas in the middle of a presentation, despite the fact that this breaks traditional presentational format. I don’t mind being slightly contrary to typical style, so long as it does not negatively impact group cohesion and the ideas presented uphold a level of quality worthy of exception. This approach has worked for us for the past few weeks without any problems and I hope that it continues to.

On another note, I’ve noticed that there has been a lot of discussion in class about the design of the course and how it is structured. A lot of the outcry has been coming from students who I know to be technically savvy and I can’t say that I haven’t thought about some of the same things that they’ve said (as I’m sure most of the class, if not all, has). I can understand where some of this outcry is coming from, but not all of it. We can all see that this course is structured differently from other classes where lecturing is the primary means of knowledge transfer. Perhaps it is the “revolutionary” nature of the class that bothers the students; perhaps they feel that since they are not being lectured, they are not being educated. Perhaps the nature of how we are being taught is so rudimentary that it evades them. There is a lot that can be learned simply by looking at how the course and assignments are laid out. The long-term group commitment in this class is something that is new to most students but is absolutely essential to future work environments where you may be working for the same group of people for much longer than ten weeks in succession. Personally, I know that I need to work on my group-work skills, and this is certainly helping me in that, almost forcing me to improve myself. Furthermore, the level of interaction with these individuals in the real world will be at a much higher level than what we are doing right now, and at a greater frequency. Combining these experiences with what we learn on co-op (where we can try these new skills out) will prepare us for the real world by allowing us to practice rudimentary skills. It also prepares us for the concept of how book knowledge will be handled – on our own time. From what I’ve learned from my brief corporate experience, there is still homework to be done and books/materials to read and learn from. However, this reading will occur on our time and people aren’t going to be giving us daily lectures on what we need to know. We’ll be placed on projects and expected to learn on our own. Sure, there will be training, but it will be expected that you have read the book before coming to “class” because “class” is going to be hands-on demonstrations and/or presentations. Training time will be used to answer complex questions that can’t be answered so much by going over the reading; they will not utilize valuable class time covering basic concepts that you should be able to pick up on your own by reading the book. I like the fact that we can do this outside of class (where I can cover this basic material a lot faster on my own) and then spend the class time doing things that the class needs to really cover together. Unlike many other classes, we actually have the opportunity to have an impact on a real-world application and analyze from the standpoint of real HCI designers. We are forced to consider many aspects, and we have the opportunity to ask questions about what has already been done with the project and where the project is headed. Not only is this a real-world application, it is a unique concept that has not been done before. For these reasons, I think we are learning skills through this class that cannot be taught by lecture, but rather we are learning the kinds that need to be learned through experience. What I’m learning is that I can work with anyone, no matter how conflicting their personalities are to my own, as long as we are working within the proper psychological context or make the proper first impressions – positive and with the outlook that we’re in this together. I worry when my classmates get so irate; their arguments take away from valuable class time. However, I can also gain some insight as to their thought processes when they express themselves in such a raw format. One of the advantages of user feedback in an iterative design process (as I see this course to be, based on what we’ve been told) is that user satisfaction can be improved with each iteration. Of course, I also believe that a certain degree of dissatisfaction is necessary in an educational environment to really get the students to think. We may not appreciate it upfront, but at the end we look back (after all of our complaining) and realize how far we’ve come. That’s another lesson that this course reinforces: how much effort we put in determines how far we go. The course is what we make of it.

Overall I think that this course has been a positive experience for me, and I think that when I look back at the end I will see that I have come a long way. As with other courses in the past, this realization probably will not come until the end, and I can only assume/hope, based on the fact that I recognize many benefits already, that I will get a lot out of this course. Given the credo above (it’s what we make of it) and the fact that I am currently only taking two courses right now (as I am on co-op), I have the necessary time to spend thinking about this course and putting effort into its assignments. I think that the various media utilized will help me to construct a comprehensive understanding of interaction design. As we go I try to also apply what I learn to my co-op position, simply for further reinforcement. I hope that the argumentative nature of my classmates subsides a bit so that we can focus more on the tasks at hand, but I’m not sure to what extent that will happen. My group composition is interesting and new to me, and I think that I will learn a lot from working with them. I hope that we can continue to improve how well we work together and succeed as a group. I particularly enjoy class discussion and the spread of ideas on the Blackboard forum (although I think that that particular interface could be improved a bit as well). I have a put a lot of effort into this course already and I intend to continue to make the most of it. I think that I have done well so far in doing so.

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