Reflection
We learned a variety of things about the design process in this project.
First and foremost, the need for user testing became salient. There were various quirks about our system that were immediately apparent to us, but which weren't quite as obvious to our test users, and we wouldn't have been able to catch this without user testing. Since we are all familiar with the mental model of our design, it's easy to overlook things that may be difficult to understand to outsiders.
There is a lot of value in sketching out and designing the object models and relationships before beginning implementation. Some of the relationships between objects in our system aren't always that obvious and have some quirks. A lot of time and grief could have been avoided if we had sketched out in full detail all of the different models, their properties, and their relationships to each other, before beginning implementation.
As is often the case with most projects, one starts off very ambitiously, and when it comes time to implement and meet deadlines, it becomes really obvious really fast that one won't be able to implement the feature set one desires and needs to scale down. It would have been good, from the start, to begin with a much simpler product with less features (yet still satisfying the core necessities) and scaled up from there if time permits. Having a few too many features left to our engineering efforts becoming spread too thin, with many features not being as polished as they could be. This may also be a consequence of simply the problem we chose to tackle, which would necessarily have required a diverse set of features. Thus, there may have been some value in being more critical at the early stages of which problem we wanted to tackle, and pick one that intuitively might not require a solution with a large amount of functionality.