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- Keeping in mind the feasibility of any given feature during brainstorming. A voice interface might be awesome idea, but implementing it might be too much to ask for, given the time we had.
- Everybody is not going to agree on everything, but disagreement can sometimes be a good thing. Discussion has to be a delicate balance between not disagreeing too much that nothing gets done and agreeing too much that an environment of group think fosters which leads to the implementation of bad ideas.
- Things that might seem simple because you see them everywhere in your daily life might not be so simple. For example, a simple shopping cart can be very difficult to implement depending on your website's back-end.
If we could do it again
Looking back, we should have obviously started sooner, but you can say that about every project. One problem that might have chosen a better user population than the elderly. In the city, it is difficult to user test the elderly. We would have also started using ruby-on-rails since the computer prototype. We ended up implementing everything for the computer prototype using javascript, css and html, and eventually had to scrap all of that code and start over for our ruby-on-rails implementation.
Meta Decisions
When making design decisions we usually tried to focus on the features that made our product different to the typical shopping site. For the paper prototype, we made the re-sizing feature a priority and also had users test our voice interface. The voice interface testing was just a simple Wizard of Oz testing scenario. The voice interface proved to be very difficult to implement and we unfortunately could not incorporate it in our final design. Had we known this earlier on, we would have focused on other features like our improved customer service and recurrent purchases. For the computer prototype, a problem we faced was deciding how deep (level of back-end implementation) to make the site. In being a prototype we wanted it to be pretty shallow, but choosing the correct amount became tricky.