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The paper prototyping stage helped us establish our initial risk assessments - namely, that the main difficulty was conveying to the user our model that sentences would be displayed only if the words they contained were specified as being displayable in sentences, and included the study focus if there was one. Thus, we focused our prototyping efforts mainly on the vocab and textbook selection, and less on logging in, reading and understanding the sentences themselves or contributing sentences, with which users had little difficulty in early prototyping stages. Of course, we still did include these tasks in our later user testing stages as well to ensure that no regressions were occurring.
Our design process was flexible, and revisited even our most core assumptions based on observations made in prototyping. For example, one of the decisions we made early in the design process was our model for which sentences would be displayed. Namely, initially we would not display sentences if they didn't have words that the user had selected as being allowed to be displayed; later we would allow sentences containing words the user hadn't selected as being allowed to be displayed, though these sentences would be displayed last, and the novel words would be highlighted - this noticeably reduced the frustration users had in fetching new sentences. Thus, our design process was holistic and considered all elements of the interface as up for revision, avoiding setting any elements of the design into stone.
After we implemented the computer prototype, our basic design layout stayed the same for the most part. Although, we did discuss alternatives that we ultimately discarded upon realizing that the ideas would clutter the screen or be inconsistent. For example, we discussed using a tree view to display words in the word look-up in the left side bar, but decided that tree views were mostly associated with outlining information rather than displaying information. Looking back, we realize that we should have paid more attention to and experimented more with the wording used in the interface. The problem was apparent from paper prototyping, but we had thought the problem was sufficiently addressed in computer prototyping. However, the problem surfaced again in later stages due to insufficient tests.
A newly implemented function/tab, the "Closed Sentences" tab was established after user request for a method of cleaning up sentences in the "Currently Reading" tab. We chose this particular recycle-bin format implementation as an extra function for efficiency, user-control, and error correction. correction (allowing users to restore closed sentences). An added feature of the search filter text box allow users to filter through closed sentences for efficient use.