Monday, 14 April 2008

• Project: Phase 3 and Reflections

  I shall talk briefly about the final phase as the details are in our group report. In this final phase, I learned a lot about the different kinds of useability tesing methods and evaluation methods. Card-sorting, prototype testing etc were all new to me and hence this was an interesting learning journey.

  The process of creating a new product, in this case a website, is no doubt a tedious one. I never thought that creating a new product takes that much effort and thinking, but I guess you never know till you experience the process.

  In this project, I feel that the hardest part was creating a product that users would like and enjoy using, in other words a product that will result in high quality user experience. It all seems so easy at first, but when you really start on it, it dawns on you that it is one of the hardest thing to do as user experience is so subjective.

  In creating our website, we had to constantly ask ourselves this: How do we create something that every user will like and enjoy using? Is it even possible? Well, perhaps it is not possible for Each and Every one of our user to like our website, but it is possible to maximize the number of users who like our product. I feel that the key lies in simplicity. We should never underestimate the power of simplicity. A simple website can speak volumes as compared to one that is messy and cluttered (as implied by the quote on the top of my blog). Hence, I feel that simplicity will never go wrong. In "The non-designer web book" by Robin Williams and John Tollett, they said: " It takes a very self-assured designer to recognize and act on the power of simplicty". Indeed, this is very true.

  While trying to make our website as simple and as user friendly as possible for our users, we practically drained all our brain power. It is really not as easy as it sounds to make something simple and easy to use. Firstly, as we are the people designing it, what might appear straight forward and clear cut to us might not be the case for a first time user. Next, we have to consider not only usability but also aesthetics and the overall package. This is where our usability testing really helped. When we first presented our information architecture in class, Mr Reddy and many others were confused (though we thought it wasn't at all confusing as we were the ones who came up with it). Through their feedback, and feedback from the card-sorting and prototype testing, we managed to improve on it and incorporated these suggestions into our high fidelity prototype. And indeed, our high fidelity prototype tetsing yielded more positive results, though of course, there are still areas that we should improve on.

  A last point to make is that what we learned about design being an Iterative process has never been more true, especially when the product is a website and making changes to it is much easier than changing a tangible product after it has been lauched into the market.

   

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