Reflection

Perhaps the most prominent lesson we learned from this process is how valuable paper prototyping is in UI design.  The ease with which one can iterate on a paper prototype is much, much greater than with a digital one, since rapidly iterating web layouts can be tricky at times.  Paper prototyping is very quick, which leads to the generation of many different ideas and successful merging of the good ones, particularly with good feedback from testers.

If we were to do it again, we may choose to use a tool for the digital prototyping process (in the parts of our interface where we could) to allow actual iteration digitally.  Most of our iteration came from the earlier stages of development.  While it worked out for us, if we had run into major usability issues after receiving our heuristic evaluations, we would have felt like we had unnecessarily sunk a lot of time into the previous version.  Digital prototyping will probably never be as easy as paper prototyping, but a tool specifically developed for it may have encouraged more iteration during that step of the process.

With that said, I think we responded very well to the results of our user testing and heuristic evaluations.  User testing during our paper prototyping certainly helped us pick which representation of the joystick model would be most intuitive, and heuristic evaluations helped us fine-tune how things looked and which things needed to be made more prominent or obvious within the interface.  Our decision to not test things like logging in was perfectly reasonable, as people who have been on the internet already know how to do those sorts of universal things, and we never ran into any problems regarding it.  Focusing on testing the joystick model and how to navigate around the site were the more important pieces of information to gather, and it kept our testing sessions short and focused so the tester wouldn't be restless.