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Our group learned many things about development, design, and prototyping throughout this course and . We learned about the iterative design process of making our an application. One of the main things that we had to deal with was that we aren't are not the users. We realized that you don't know how users will interact with your product until you actually allow them to access it in some level . This comes in the form of prototyping, which provides challenges we were not used to as a developer. It is difficult to design a backend for an ever changing front end implementation.
Another thing we learned was that in design there is not always a right answer. In class, when we viewed Hall of Shame examples, most times there were often blatant aspects that we as a class could agree made the interface more difficult to use. However, most applications don't have clearly defined lines like this. We frequently encountered user issues where one user might consider an aspect a convenient feature while another user considers it a terrible design flaw. We encountered these decisions even amongst our own team members, such as when we were deciding how to do self populating fields in our add/edit bill interface.
As prototyping was new to all members of our team, we made some 'rookie' mistakes during paper prototyping that resulted in a lost of valuable feedback. Instead of focusing on the interface's usability, our users were distracted with issues in our tasks' wording and navigation blunders. The latter problem occurred as a result of not being able to see the top of the prototype easily from their the tester's seat. This provided us only limited feedback as we began computer prototyping. With the technical difficulties we later encountered, getting more initial feedback would have allowed us to avoid some of the issues we encountered and spend more time developing more useful features.
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As we mentioned in our Implementation section, we had numerous issues resulting from our decision to use Scripts. When we realized that it was going to limit us and undermine our development progress, we should have used another host service that would give us the freedom we needed to develop more easily. However , this choice would have been a more expensive option.