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- The main thing that we learned over the course of the semester is that we are not our user. That is, even if we think something is simple, obvious, or clear, this does not mean that the user will feel the same way. We have a lot of preconceived notions about what things should do because we actually created them, the users of our system will not be in that position and are thus much more likely to be confused.
- There is no one right method of testing. We caught different things that needed to fixed when doing heuristic evaluation vs paper prototyping for example. Heuristic evaluation was much better for finding things that needed to be visually fixed. It was very helpful to get someone else's opinions on what the website was missing in terms of display and aesthetics. Where as, paper-prototyping was better at providing us with functionality problems. User testing was very helpful in drawing a line between what we though thought vs. what the user though thought and how we perceived the site as a whole. For us, the most useful tests were those where users tried to play with the system and commented on whenever wherever they got stuck or confused (i.e. paper-prototyping and user testing).
- If we were doing this project over again, we would focus on providing more options for how things are done in paper-prototyping. For instance, we would present three options for QR image re-sizing. One a text box, one a drop down box, and one with a slide-rule. Basically, we would have preferred to add a step into the iterative design process where we did something like AB Testing to determine which designs were optimal for the most users.
- Doing this project again, we would focus a lot more on testing with a lot of users (as opposed to less than 5). With this many users it was hard to get a general feel for how they all felt together, but rather their individual concerns, which may or may not have been necessary or realistic.
- Finally we would have liked to do some smaller rounds of user testing, not just on the final implementation, but on some of the modular sections as they were completed. While the overall experience for the user cannot be tested without an almost fully complete implementations, several individual sections of the application are significant enough to stand on their own and warrant user testing. In this way, we could catch usability problems earlier on in each of the parts and iterate on them, before pulling all of the tasks together into a test of the overall final design and experience.