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- In general, we found this class highly rewarding to learning about user-centered software design. Though the Spiral Model is frequently preached in other software development classes, only in this class is it truly emphasized. Cheap iterations played a large role in honing out developed UI ideas, preventing us from spending the effort to implement a feature that was not well-received.
- In the future, one thing I would find particularly useful is another round of paper prototyping, especially evaluating design decisions we were not totally sure about. In user testing stage, we should be more persistent about clarifying what exactly was difficult about a particular task, if any difficulty is found.
- One very core thing we learned as a team was the discrepancy between the mind of the user and the mind of the designer. Things that were immediately clear to us was not necessarily the case for our users. In this respect, user testing was invaluable. Even our hardest efforts to think from the user's standpoint did not reveal nearly as much as a paper prototype in front of an user.
- One thing we would change in the future is to draft more realistic paper prototypes. Templating tools have readily available Android UI toolkits, which would easily give us a more realistic paper prototype. This may trade the perceived cheapness of the prototype, but we believe that a prototype that visually looks more similar to an actual app has more perceived affordance than a hand-drawn one.