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- Mentioned he would like to be able to check the users who were following his job post to see his/her profile. This issue was also brought up by our TA, Vijay, in the project demo. As this issue had not come up during the user/task analysis or in any of the prototype evaluations, we did not implement it. However, we realized it is easy to fix as in the JavaScript back-end, we already keep track of the followers for each job post, and we realized we could just have a separate button next to a post the user has created in the “My Posts” tab to view all followers of a post.
Reflection
In the course of the iterative process of designing and implementing our interface, we principally learned the skill of self-critique. At all stages, of the design process, we had to analyse our own designs and find room for improvement.
The very first task of coming up with several potential designs for our implementation proved to be the most difficult but turned out to be the task that influenced our design the most. Having to come up with 4 different designs made us consider many different approaches by which we could lay out the MITJobs interface. This process was particularly instrumental because when we selected one of the designs to work with, we realized that most of the improvements we thought of could be attained by incorporating various parts of the alternate designs that we had come up with.
We also learned that actual user reviews can expose completely unforeseen potential problems in mostly the layout of a user interface. The reviews we received from our evaluators were broad but starkly incisive; ranging from layout issues, to buttons being too big and inter-tab consistency mishaps.
The process of building the feedback and the interactions between different parts of the website was the most difficult, and decisions about the interface during the paper prototyping phase influenced and changed a lot how the different parts of the website interacted with each other. Hence it is clear for us that the first stages of development of a product play a big role on what a product may become and, therefore, should be considered as a very important part of software development.
Since both user reviews and paper prototyping are really important for software development, we also learned that the development of a software is not a single stage phase that has a determined time to start and to end. Software development is complex and requires to be constantly updated so it can satisfy the needs of the users.