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Our initial writeup for GR1 did not fully cover the details of the user population, and did not distinguish between essential and non-essential tasks. After extensive feedback from Sacha, we revisited our task analysis and worked to resolve those issues, ultimately creating a great road map for Hubbub's design and implementation. We created three essential tasks: reading, filtering, and managing/saving items. The reading and filtering tasks remained consistent throughout Hubbub's entire design and implementation process. Similarly, the subtask of managing items translated into a tagging interface with minor design changes across milestones. In contrast, the process for saving items underwent extensive redesign multiple times from GR2 to GR5.
Evaluating our user population turned out to be a very important part our analysis, and helped us frame Hubbub's design goals in a way that made Hubbub considerably more useful for our target user population. If we didn't act on Sacha's feedback and update our evaluation, we would've run the risk of completely missing the whole point of the UID course, focusing more on the low-level details of Hubbub (like algorithms and performance) than what users would actually want out of it.
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Initially, we each had very different ideas for how we wanted Hubbub to look and behave, which translated into a lot of different interface sketches for GR2. However, by the end of GR2 we had a pretty clear idea for Hubbub's design, and some of our story boards ended up being fairly close to the behavior of Hubbub's final interface. We explored different ways to filter feed information, as well as alternative approaches for presenting feed items to the user. Initially, we wanted to restrict the length of the feed based on the amount of free time the user had to devote to interacting with the feed. However, we abandoned this idea in favor of a more intuitive filtering interface. This made Hubbub's filtering implementation simpler for GR5, since the filtering algorithms were easier to implement. In addition, we Considering how hard it was for us to make filtering intuitive, adding more complicated filtering algorithms would have probably slowed us down. We also decided to provide a scrollable list of feed items. We decided felt that this was much more efficient than our other interfacesdesigns, which would require required the user to swipe or tap a button every time they want wanted to see a new feed item. The feed list ended up being very intuitive for our users, and none of them suggested changing this part of the interface's design.
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