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- Discuss what you learned over the course of the iterative design process. If you did it again, what would you do differently? Focus in this part not on the specific design decisions of your project (which you already discussed in the Design section), but instead on the meta-level decisions about your design process: your risk assessments, your decisions about what features to prototype and which prototype techniques to use, and how you evaluated the results of your observations.
The most important thing we learnt is that user testing is really important!
If we had to do it again, I think a heuristic evaluation of our initial designs would have been useful, to get some very early feedback on our design (GR2) before even doing the paper prototypes. We spoke to some classmates about our design, but a more in-depth review would have pointed out some obvious problems that we could have then avoided in the paper prototypes. We would also have done more rounds of testing with paper prototypes. We ended up throwing away a lot of code after doing a round of informal user testing on our initial design (before GR4), and a 3rd round of paper prototype testing would have brought up these issues before we began coding, saving us lots of time.
Reviewing the heuristic evaluations and deciding what advice was important and what we should ignore was also important. Some of the advice we got in our heuristic evaluation was very useful, but other advice was misguided (perhaps because the back-end functionality wasn't working yet). If we had blindly followed all the advice we got, I think we would've ended up scrapping a lot of key features that were important to our design but not clear in implementation as of GR4. Having a relatively advanced prototype as of GR4 helped a lot in this respect, though, because testers could get a better sense of our application.
Another aspect of the design process that was very important was the initial project proposal and analysis, background research, etc. Speaking to users and figuring out what they would actually want was really important and helpful in focusing our application and deciding what features were important. This also let us design our initial prototype with these features in mind, and get feedback on what to include and what to scrap. For example, the bulletin board was initially