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Over the course of the iterative design process, our team learned a great deal. The most important thing we learned was something very fundamental to UI, we were reinforced by the fact that the designer thinks very differently from the user. What seems so clear to the designer may be completely confusing the user. Because of this we had to try to think from the users standpoint, and make every aspect of our app as simple and clear as it could possibly be. Another thing we learned was the sometimes sacrifices need to be made for the overall goal of usability. In some parts of our app we needed to sacrifice learnability for efficiency. For example, one of our very first drafts of the app included three seperate tabs, one with a visual representation of the list of items to pack (aka backpack/shelf, ect) and one with a text representation of the list, which could be edited to add new items, ect. However, we realized that this would require the user to go back and forth between two modes many different times, which would be very slow and annoying. Although it would be easier beeasier to see list of items to pack in two forms, it was a much better idea to keep it simple and efficient and only showcase one mode.
If we were to do this project over again, we would do several things differently. We would prototype the main feature of the app more thoroughly. When changes needed to be made to the app after user testing, we would make sure to create/sketch a completely new draft that included these improvements, instead of just editing it a little at a time based on each new comment, as that allows for some sloppy errors in the long term. (For example, you change one thing but have to change it back based on other users opinions.) Anther thing we would change is to prototype a more realistic looking version of our application. The paper prototypes were much bigger than the screen size of any of our phones, and we felt that this allowed certain objects to look better on paper than they actually turned out to be on the phone. The final and most important thing we would do differently is to really listen to every comment a user makes. Sometimes it is easy to think that the designer is correct, or that the designer's implementation is good enough and that the user will "get it", but in the end the user is always correct. Some details the users mentioned were confusing ended up being a big problem when we finally created a working version of our application. More focus on these details during the testing phase would've helped us a lot for our final app.