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- JQuery Mobile is a new framework. It is still a bit immature and heavy to run on a mobile phone. Sometimes it is very slow to load and render.
- Sinatra provides a limited amount of functionality that would not allow us to scale up fully.
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.