Design
Describe the final design of your interface. Illustrate with screenshots. Point out important design decisions and discuss the design alternatives that you considered. Particularly, discuss design decisions that were motivated by the three evaluations you did (paper prototyping, heuristic evaluation, and user testing).
Implementation
Describe the internals of your implementation, but keep the discussion on a high level. Discuss important design decisions you made in the implementation. Also discuss how implementation problems may have affected the usability of your interface.
Server end for music management:
Possibly the most important decision was to branch off an existing opensource application designed for music streaming. While this cost a signficant amount of time in terms of getting used to their code base, and implementing the voting and UI in their framework, I think it ultimately saved time. However, this implementation tied us pretty closely to an using sql databases for a music management and votes. It is unclear whether this will scale very well, even to the 100 user mark.
In terms of UI design, people responded best to designs reminiscent of existing ones. For example, users liked having a tab interface for playlists. Although initally we thought it would be awkward, users also preferrred a simple table of all songs, rather than a more complex filtering system.
Evaluation
Users
Describe how you found your users and how representative they are of your target user population (but don't identify your users by name).
User was a graduate student with some interest in music, not much in parties. User was friend.
Briefing
Scenario Tasks
Add music to library
Make a playlist
vote
Usability Problems
List the usability problems you found, and discuss how you might solve them.
Many users identified problems with drag and drop functionality with multiple items(Minor). Swing's interface for this is somewhat less than intuitive, and more time could have been spent here. Also, users would have liked to preview music directly from this application(Major). Users also felt it was awkward to give a URL directly out to friends, one user recommended using a QR code.
Reflection
I definitely would have presented more fundamentally different designs, rather than modifications on a single theme. By the end of the iterative process, the end product was quite different(probably a good thing), but many of the changes occurred very late in the process. Also, in an attempt to save work, prototypes were done in swing, as to use them in the final design. It might have been more effective to do the products in an easier prototyping tool such as Flex in order to test more prototypes.
Discuss what you learned over the course of the iterative design process. If you did it again, what would you do differently? Focus in this part not on the specific design decisions of your project (which you already discussed in the Design section), but instead on the meta-level decisions about your design process: your risk assessments, your decisions about what features to prototype and which prototype techniques to use, and how you evaluated the results of your observations.