Team Reflection
Overall, this 9-week process has been very rewarding. Our team came in with some experience in design, but it was our first time going through the entire user-centered design process. From start to finish, our team met virtually every week for multiple hours to work on deliverables for this project. Without the combined efforts of everyone on the team, Healthy Huskies would not have come to fruition. Through this process, we developed a deeper understanding of what it means to empathize with users, especially as students ourselves. In addition, we have been able to practice our skills as designers through extensive research, ideation, and prototyping while understanding what it means to be a successful team. Communication is a key factor in our team's success and each of us came into this project with shared goals that we hoped to accomplish together. When our teams were formed, we created a list of group norms to establish in order to cultivate a healthy working environment. Each of us came from different design backgrounds; however, we found that through working together, we were all able to practice and learn new design skills. Ultimately, our group meshed very well together and this experience served as a way for us each to connect with one another while taking on new skills in user-centered design.
Project Reflection
We came into this project with little to no experience with the user-centered design process but have learned a lot from this project and the mistakes we made along the way. In each step, we furthered our understanding of the design process and if we did this project again, there would be a few things that we would change.
Here are our biggest takeaways from the past 9 weeks:
- When conducting user interviews, we learned that it can be difficult to leave any bias out of our questions. Each member of the team had used the Husky Coronavirus Testing Program before and we each had our own opinions of it. We really had to focus on avoiding questions that pushed our users to say something that we wanted them to say and tried to make our questions as neutral as possible in order to receive truthful and unbiased user feedback.
- The user interviews also showed us how to write questions that would help us in designing the project. After conducting our user interviews, it was easy to see what questions were helpful and what questions were irrelevant. When we do this process again, we will have a much better understanding of what kinds of questions to ask users to get feedback that will really make a difference in the design.
- While conducting usability testing, we found that ourselves feeling very rushed and believe that we could have received better feedback if we had more time. We did not have our low fidelity prototypes as functional as we would have liked before testing them with our users. If we had been able to test them more ourselves to make them fully functional, our users would have been able to give us better insights on how we could improve our design.
- Our whole team had little to no experience with Figma, and as a result, we found ourselves spending a lot of time figuring out how to work the program. Looking back, we could see all of the ways we could use these developed skills to spend less time making the elements and interactions of our prototypes. This would have allowed us to have more time for other portions of the project such as usability testing.
- Lastly, if we had more time for this project we would have done more usability testing, where we would have conducted usability testing with the "Wizard of Oz" approach. Our prototypes had limitations as our app relies heavily on information updates that are difficult or not possible to implement with Figma. The Wizard of Oz approach would allow us to display the correct information and pages while conducting usability testing and would allow us to gain more feedback on how to improve our design.