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- UI design requires both detail-oriented and big-picture vision: Over the course of the semester, each of us came to learn that the UI design process is a delicate one. Every detail matters, but it is also important to establish a goal and direction early on in the design process – and also make sure to remain goal-oriented throughout.
- User/usability testing is an involved process: Standardization is important and necessary in order to obtain valid and accurate responses from potential users. A key skill is knowing how to interact (and remain silent) with users during the testing process; there is a fine line between too little and too much when explaining the interface to the user. Additionally, it is important to test a variety of users, as some may be more experienced or knowledgable about a certain topic than others.
- Less is more: Throughout this process, we came to understand the importance of simplicity and minimalistic design. When an interface is crowded with several features, each of them loses significance – we decided to focus on a few important aspects that eventually created what we believe to be a successful product.
- Heuristic evaluation is a powerful tool: Having individuals who know the elements of user interface design analyze and provide feedback is an extremely powerful method on improving a user interface.
- The user is always right and it's hard to think like a user: It is hard to distance oneself from the role of the developer and forget the things you know and the attachment you have to what one has created. It is important to get objective opinions about a user interface, and usually the ones who designed the interface will be some of the last to determine certain problems.
- Not everyone interprets things the same way: Sometimes we would get feedback or would observe the same user action during testing but when we came together, we each thought we had seen something different or that the cause of the behavior were different factors. It is always important to have someone recording the results and user actions as they happen and also to ask the user questions questions about their behavior/choices when using the user interface.
4.2 What Would We Do Differently? (Meta-Level)
- More testingusers for each of our tests: Though the amount of usability testing that we conducted was sufficient enough to provide us with valuable feedback, we feel that testing both the paper prototype and initial design on a wider variety of users would have given us more insight into our target user population. Additional paper prototypes would have saved us a great deal of time and provided more user feedback during additional iterations.
- More rounds of testing: We also believe that we should have done more iterations of testing after coming up with new designs after GR4. We were too focused on creating a final product that was what we wanted instead of ensuring that from the beginning that we were focused on something that that our user population would want and could use.