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Results: Generally, the users liked the interface and thought it was really useful. Both users liked the fact that the design was minimal and easy to set up a meeting. One of the users was grateful that some of the suggestions she made was incorporated in the design. She suggested the responder to be able to indicate the dates that he prefer and Mashcal will sort of merge the available times and find the optimum time. They really want to see the some sort notification implemented. Push
Recommendations: Push notification or text message notification would make Mashcal even more more usable.
Problems: They did not really have any issue going through the scenarios.
Reflection
The biggest thing our team took away from the iterative design process is the idea that we are not the user. Throughout all of the prototyping and user testing, we were continually surprised that interaction methods we thought were intuitive confused users. Users also surprised us by attempting to use the interaction methods in ways we did not intend. Especially on a mobile app, it is necessary to conform enough with the platform that users can think in their "iPhone paradigm" but be unique enough to make the app intuitive and exciting.
During the implementation phase, it became clear to us that frameworks are the way to go: someone or some team has done the hard work of designing widgets and thinking about the consistency of them and how they interact together. However, it is still challenging to choose these widgets and compose them together in ways that the user expects and is familiar with.
We also realized that the we have to take an iterative approach when doing a user design. Even after two or three iterations of testing, during the evaluation, we received recommendations that would increase the usability of our design. This goes to show that we have to be taking inputs of the users into account throughout the design, implementation, testing, and deployment period of the software.
There are some features of the interface could benefit from like push notifications, multiple rounds of date selection. In the future, these features could be incorporated to make Mashcal the best date selector out there,