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Multiple users commented on the desired functionality to be able to directly view trip logistics and book traveling tickets from CollegeRoute. While this was on the horizon for most of the semester, the ability to interface with actual transportation providing agencies is very possible and would be a welcome addition as a feature to CollegeRoute.
Reflection
Our iterative design process benefited from a solid understanding of the problem; this familiarity with the problem was developed during the need-finding stage of the project. We quickly narrowed down conducted a lot of interviews to ensure that we had a comprehensive idea of what users would want and need from an application like ours. We quickly narrowed down the user population to focus primarily on parents (or high school students) planning trips to visit colleges.
The paper prototyping process was extremely useful and we were able to get a lot of design decisions solidified or drastically altered simply from this low fidelity process. If we were to go through the process again, we would have liked to present alternate ideas to users during this stage so that we could have tested more designs at once and gotten better feedback about what would potentially be intuitive and useful. Going into the paper prototyping we did have a few alternate designs in mind in case the decisions we made were shown to be difficult or poor, but it would have been nice to have the initial user feedback on these alternate designs as well so that making decisions about what to switch to when changing our first design would have been simpler.
One major example of where we should have used more paper prototyping is the itinerary planning component of our application. The computer prototyping and implementation would have been made much easier had we paper prototyped additional designs for the itinerary planning component of our applicationthis screen because our final design ended up being drastically different from the one that we tested in the paper prototyping. Throughout the semester, we grappled with the issue of figuring out how to design the itinerary planning portion of the site such that user interactions would be intuitive, efficient, and safe. Our design evolved significantly over the course of the semester, with each iteration drawing on what worked and what was challenging from the previous iteration. All in all we ended up implementing the itinerary planning page about four times, each of which took a lot of time and energy because the implementations were fairly high fidelity because each time we believed they would be the best one. We are extremely satisfied with our final design decisions on this screen, but if we had started with a design closer to the final one earlier we could have made further improvements and implemented additional website features as opposed to re-prototyping this page multiple times.
However, our lack of foresight with implementation allowed us to truly incorporate user feedback and we all discussed the merits of observations made during user testing. This was something we did well because we were willing to throw away entire implementations when we realized that the user was having trouble. Although it would have been ideal to do this with low fidelity prototypes, for any UI design process in the future we would want to make sure that we had the same end goal of ensuring that the design was based around the needs and expectations of the user and not based on design decisions that we had made, implemented and were too attached to.