Hello and welcome back. As we're starting the second course in the sequence, I'd like to provide a fictional didactic example of the design process from user research to specific ideas. Now, I'm going to go through this Russian Fable. And if some of you grew up in Eastern Europe, this may sound familiar. Maybe your grandma told you this fable as you were growing up. For some of you, this would be new. So here we go. Once upon a time, they're lived three brothers. Sergei was the oldest brother and he was blessed with the best programming skills in the land. His code always compiled and he never had any logical errors in his code. Vladimir was the middle brother and he was blessed with a great work ethic, he always put in the time to test everything until everything works well and all the usability bugs are fixed. And finally, Ivan the youngest brother. Well, nobody really thought he was blessed with bunch of anything and most of the village called him Ivan the fool, it was pretty typical version folk tales. So one morning, the three brother were having brunch with the princess and she mentioned that she was worried about her kids. So she wanted them to have some independence but Russian Fables are actually pretty dangerous place to live. For example, witches are always trying to turn children into goats, or gaggles of geese are trying to carry them away to faraway lands, and she just wished that she could know where her kids were and that they were safe. So Sergei immediately thinks what an opportunity I'm going to build a tracking app that will show locations of family members. And I know just how I'm going to do it. And Vladimir thinks what an opportunity I'm going to build the tracking app, I'm not really sure about what it looks like yet but I'll do some work and I'll figure out how to get the design right. And Ivan thinks why are Internet cats so funny. No, that's not what he thinks, he thinks there's maybe an opportunity here but I don't know what the right design here would be. What is the problem that I'm trying to solve? What are the really important goals in supporting location sharing between parents and children? So you're really starting with, I don't know. So Sergei goes off and he sits in a coffee shop for 20 hours and he makes a location sharing app. He puts it in the Android marketplace and he waits for the downloads. But even though his app is technically perfect there is no bugs in it. There's lots of other tracking apps out there. Not having any bugs in his app is not enough to make it succeed. In the mean time, Vladimir starts doing the hard work of figuring out what his tracking app for parents will be like. So he sends out a survey to a bunch of parents about potential features. And he finds out that they don't really want to stare at an app of their kids locations all day. What they really want is an alarm that will go off if the kids are outside of their usual areas. So he makes a paper prototype of his app to make sure that all of the features that are important are there and easy to find. He tests this and iterate based on the parent's feedback. And then finally, he implements it in code. He's not a perfect programmer. And there are some bugs, and design bugs as well in his code. But he is able to catch those through user testing. He deploys his app in the marketplace and he finds that he gets a lot of downloads because he did a good job targeting the app to the needs of parents. And by the way, this is the classic user design process. If you leave this course acting like Vladimir, you will be already ahead of the people who just know how to program well. So don't discount Vladimir. But let's see what Ivan did. So remember he basically doesn't know what he wants to build. All he knows is that he wants to find out more about what motivates location sharing in families and see if there's any opportunities there. So he sets up on a long journey traveling far and wide throughout the land. He talks to parents, he talks to children of different ages. He talks to teachers all about location sharing. And he finds that there's actually four different types of motivation provocation sharing. All of them are different and all of them may require different solutions. First of all, the most similar to what the princess was talking about, many parents wanted to be able to give their young kids some independence but still be able to set limits about where they could go and get alerts of something unusual is happening, but Ivan didn't just talked to the parents, he also talked to the kids and he observed them. And he found out that for kids younger than ten, they're really not that good at carrying their phone around. And so they're always forgetting it or losing it somewhere and maybe a phone is not the right solution for tracking them. Second, Ivan also discovered that for some of the families' location sharing was just really about having general sense of what everybody was up to. So that you can plan things like dinner time or spontaneous following to the movie. For these family, the solution needed to be glanceable rather than something that would take multiple clicks to get to. Or you have to whip out your phone, open an app to find some feature of the app and multiple minutes to interpret. Third, some parents really did not want to be constantly checking their kids location. In fact, they might have even thought that it was a violation of their children's privacy. Instead, what they really wanted was an emergency alarm for those really serious situation. That would share the location of the child not just with the parent, but also with the police and other emergency services. And of course, the key is that this has to be really easy to trigger in an emergency, but also really hard to trigger by accident. Of course you don't want to be calling the police, or the ambulance every five minutes. And lastly, parents of teenagers wanted location tracking so that they can enforce the punishment of being grounded. But Ivan also talked to teenagers. And he found out that, well, A, they'd find a way to get around anything and cheated if they really needed to. But B, they were really frustrated that it seemed like when you got in trouble, it seem like you could only get in more trouble. There was no way to show that you were doing the right thing. How are teenagers suppose to develop responsive ability and regain trust if they have agency, that's what the teens he spoke to said. So why Ivan went and spent a ton of time coming up with that ideas for solutions, many ideas were in fact pretty foolish but some ended up sounding promising. He sketched and he make paper prototypes and low prototypes and gotten more and more user feedback. This was his way of making sure that he got the right design. That he was solving the right problem for the needs that each family had. So finally, Alben came up with ideas for each of the four motivations of family location sharing. First to track young kids, he got away from the idea of having them carry their cellphones and instead switch to a bracelet. For families who wanted a glance-able sense of each other's whereabouts he made a clock inspired by Harry Potter books that described each person's context. And actually by the way, a side note, this was a real project. This is a project for Microsoft Research Cambridge. I'll link to it at the end of the slides. For the emergency alerts, he created special shoe inserts. If you clicked your heels a certain way, easy to do on purpose but hard to do by accident, they transmit your location to emergency services. And finally he made an app for families with teenagers, but instead of tracking the teen, the app asks the teen to voluntarily check in and share what their doing. So it kind of flips the agency of the app letting the teens feel they have the power to rebuild that trust with their parent after getting in trouble instead of feeling like they're being tracked and have no raise to privacy. And look, in real life we all have constraints. Maybe you work for an app development company and you have to build an app. You can't go around building a shoe. But, following this process may a log you to zig when other people are zaging. I've been built an app too but, it was a very different app that one of his brothers built. So, maybe you can't build a clock as part of your project but, what if the clock faces actually represented as an active locks screen for a phone. The key inside there is not that it has to be a clock but, it is easily glanceable it something you can look at in interpret in a few seconds. Maybe you can't build magical shoes, but what if you could detect when a phone is being thrown with a particular violence, and call emergency services if that happens because it might be indicative of a car accident, or the kid being kidnapped. So this kind of thinking, where you look at lots of different solutions, lots of different ideas, this kind of thinking is never wasted time. So the good news is that Ivan was able to be really successful with all of his ideas. He sold some of the syllabus, others as licensed, some as an app and he integrated successful kick starter from making his location sharing family clock. With these successes he was able to start and get funded at a company that focuses on technology for families. Because Ivan is also a good guy so he hired his two brothers to work for his company. because, of course, who wouldn't want a perfect programmer, and a really hard working UEX guy working for them. But now nobody called them Ivan the Fool anymore, and they all lived happily ever after. So, of course, the story has a moral. And the moral is that "I don't know" is actually a very good place to start in design. And the story was actually about two types of thinking, convergent and divergent. Convergent thinking is about coming up to solution with the solution to a well-defined problem and iterating on the solution to make it better. That's what Vladimir did in building his family tracking app, and it was pretty good. On the other hand, divergent thinking is about exploring the problem space and coming up with lots of diverse choices and solutions. That's what Ivan did, and he came up with mini different good ideas. And at this point, I usually stop my class, and I have my class discuss what they think is more important to innovation, convergent or divergent thinking. And I let them kind of talk about it for awhile, before I reveal that it's actually a trick question. I think that both of these are actually equally important to innovation. In fact in course one, Professor Konst and I introduced three different contexts for design, depending on whether you're trying to identify a good problem Iterate on a more specific solution, or improve on an existing solution. Each of these contexts depends on divergent and convergent thinking to different extents. But the reason why I'm talking about divergent thinking, and the reason I think it's important, is because it's not the type of thinking that computer scientists generally do. For many of my compter science students, my class is the first they're exposed to practise divergent thinking. And in general thinking more than Ivan did in his table. So clearly the folks here are sparticious. But I do like telling as part of the introduction to this course. Folk tails can away with being didactic and ways that lectures can't and the main takeaways that good interface design requires lot more than just programming skills. Good designers like Ivan, create these designs by conducting significant user research to understand the problem context. They use divergent thinking to come up with many diverse ideas and designs and explore a solution space. In this course, we'll teach you the specific techniques and methods that you may need to do this user research. We'll also share specific techniques for both, divergent and convergent thinking, if you're coming up with solutions for the problems that users face. So, before I go, I just wanted to point you to a source of real Russian folktales, instead of the ones that I just made up. And also the whereabouts clock that I used in this example is, in fact, a real project, and if you have access to the ACM Digital Library, you can read the paper and read a little bit more about it. I think it's a really good example. So thank you for listening and I hope to see you in the next video.
