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- Could not easily find a way to find all jobs for McCormick -- did not realize search was possible.
- Severity: Cosmetic | Minor | Major | Catastrophic
- Solution:
- Creating a new job did not immediately show up in the list because "McCormick" was still in the search bar.
- Severity: Cosmetic | Minor | Major | Catastrophic
- Solution:
- Attempted to search for "Home Depot" in the job search bar.
- Severity: Cosmetic | Minor | Major | Catastrophic
- Solution:
Reflection
As a result of this project, our team learned that using an iterative design process, specifically the spiral model, results in a better product and also reduces stress and time wasted along the way.
If we had jumped right in and implemented our website before interviewing potential users or doing any user testing, we would have created a high fidelity product that might not have met users’ goals in terms of functionality, and the product probably would not have had a good user interface design. Then, if we were to conduct user testing after the high fidelity implementation, we may have been stubborn and not wanted to make changes that users suggested to us. Or alternatively, we would have wanted to make the changes users suggested to us, but that potentially would have required us to completely change the design of our interface, which would take much time and effort.
Using an iterative design process allowed us to build a little; get some feedback; make changes, improve, and build more; get more feedback; and so on. It gave us the opportunity to work with users and make smaller changes along the way instead of needing to make larger changes and redo large parts of the implementation process as might be necessary if using the waterfall model. Using an iterative design process forced us to think about the user at all times, and this resulted in a highly usable interface.
Paper-protoyping was useful to us for several reasons. Users didn’t have much time with the prototype so the best feedback this type of user testing gave us was on learnability, a huge part of usability. Giving users specific tasks to complete allowed us to gain insight into the user’s understanding of the system before getting to know it well (i.e., how they expect the system to behave). Also, we didn’t need to worry about the exact shape or color of particular features; we could focus on size and location of individual features as well as the overall layout of our interface. Additionally, it was exciting to see users successfully complete tasks during the paper-prototype user testing sessions, and this motivated us to actually include those relevant features in our implementation. On the other hand, seeing users struggle with certain tasks motivated us to find good solutions to those problems.
Having other students do heuristic evaluations of our website was also useful because they spent a lot of time with the website and carefully explored all aspects of it, from aesthetics to learnability to user control, providing useful insight.
If we were to do this project again, there are a couple things we could do differently. One, we would have thought more about how to incorporate categories like job type (e.g., plumbing) and dorm name (e.g., McCormick) into our design during the paper-prototype stage. We focused more on getting the general layout of our interface figured out before including this extra feature, and it turns out we didn’t implement filtering by job type or dorm name until much later in the process (during the final implementation), so our only chance to test this filtering feature was during the final user testings. It was a little stressful when we tried to incorporate this filtering feature toward the end of the implementation process. So much of the design had effectively been made concrete at this point and there weren’t many options for how to incorporate the filtering or many locations for where to include the filtering elements (we were a little unsure where to include the dropdown for adding a label to a job). If we had thought about this major feature of our design earlier perhaps we could have better incorporated it into our design and we could have gotten more user feedback. A second thing we would have done differently would be to conduct more user testing along the way of individuals in our user population (i.e., MIT dorm house managers) instead of just students. Unfortunately we didn’t have easy access to house managers, but if we had, it might have been nice to get feedback from them more often.
We really enjoyed this project! Using an iterative design process was very effective, and we feel like we learned a lot.