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Evaluation
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Reflection
The iterative design process provided three main learning paradigms that helped us to become better developers: (1) early designing provides easier changes, (2) iterative designing is more likely to find bugs, and (3) using iterative design helps develop a more detailed framework.
We came across the first point when we were working on GR2, the storyboards. It was clear that each of us had a different view of what could be improved and used in the project, and being able to play with the different ideas allowed us to combine the ideas that worked well, and leave out the ideas that were not as well fleshed out. For example, one of our members wanted to use a split screen for search, but we decided to incorporate search as a separate tab. If we had started developing a computer prototype from the beginning, our design would have been majorly flawed, and many of the ideas we came up with for the final product would not have been implemented.
Similarly, developing using iterative design allowed our team to find large bugs early on. This was especially clear when we tested GR3, the paper prototyping on our classmates. There were a lot of ideas that were not fully developed, and the major flaws stood out crystal clear. If we had not used this step to test, we would probably have to go over our code many times in order to make our ideas concrete.
Finally, the iterative design allowed us to understand our project to a greater depth. In particular, we were unsure how the structure of our project would turn out. Using the paper prototyping and computer prototyping allowed us to see how the different objects in our interface would be interacting, and how those interactions would affect the user’s experience.
If we had the opportunity to re-do our design, the first thing we would do is take the iterative design more seriously. For the majority of the work, our group was skeptical as to how effective designing in iteration would be, as our previous experience did not deal with programming in steps. However, we soon found out how useful this design system worked, and we would have definitely placed more emphasis in having better prototypes.
Furthermore, our project seemed to be very simple on a superficial level, but the back-end ending up being hell. We would probably choose a project that focused more on the user interface and much less on back end. This would help us utilize more aspects of the class in our design, and take away the aspect of taking time on a back-end. This would have placed more emphasis on GR4 and much less on GR5. *paste here*