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Reflection
One thing we realized early on is that exploration contributes to a better final product. When brainstorming for project ideas we pitched more than a dozen in total, pursuing some to the extent of writing up short interviews we had with owners of various stores (bookstores, video game stores, music stores) such as this one which never saw the light of day. All of the brainstorming culminated in a final direction that we were all satisfied with, and later we would see the payoff of exploration again by using multiple paper prototypes instead of a single one.
Overall, we learned that prototyping early and going through multiple rounds of user testing is very helpful in increasing the learnability of the final prototype. Finding usability problems early in the paper prototyping stage allowed us more flexibility when designing the computer prototype. Due to the fact that we had conducted multiple rounds of user tests (totaling over 7 users) with the paper prototypes, we were quite successful with user testing for the computer prototype - no major implementation changes were required for the computer prototype. Users specifically noted that we had taken their earlier suggestions during computer prototype user testing.
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