Project 1: Reflection #4

Project 1, done and out!

Looking back at this project, there were several takeaways. Firstly, writing the persona and scenarios offered a different experience from previous projects as I kept looking at how I could specify the context to guide my team's wireframing process, trying to incorporate what was taught in class. This included thinking of how the way they hold their phone would affect what's easy to access for them, and how they would interact and be affected by the environment. These details really guided my thinking on where I should place buttons in the wireframes such that users would not find it awkward to get to them. 

Secondly, after consultation with Dennis, it was apparent to me that one of the biggest problems I had missed at the beginning of this project was ensuring we had a clear possible problem statement that could be backed up by our user study. It was no wonder that I found this project particularly difficult. The group and I spent many hours trying to clarify our problem statement after the meeting. I was always looking to remind them about specificity and this led us to rewrite the pain points we listed in milestone 2. Only during this process that I understood Dennis's comments on our pain point of "mobile optimisation" being very vague. Not to say that what we wrote originally was wrong, it just needed reorganisation since our pain points were overlapping one another. Needless to say, I am quite ashamed of this oversight but it was a necessary learning experience as it highlighted to me how important presentation of user research really is - it can guide discussions and it can also confuse them. 

Thirdly, in our consultation, we were suggested to consider the 3 stages of proofreading in the navigational flow - creation of the document, first proofreader, and subsequent proofreaders. Though it seems tedious, Dennis's explanation of why it was important to write out persuaded me to consider its importance carefully. It was essential since we did not want any miscommunications - if we had only included the 3rd stage of subsequent proofreaders, our solution (the proofreading mode) would have looked like a separate app. As such, I had to consider, within the limited space, how we could present the 3 stages of proofreading in the navigational flow which was not an easy task since the examples covered in the seminar only described one user. I worked alongside my teammate and iterated on how we could maximise the space without overcomplicating the navigational flow. I also suggested to the team that we create a current and proposed navigational flow of the 3rd stage so that it would help us ensure that we did not miss any part of the flow out and clearly show how efficient our proposal is (since we are making tools for proofreading more accessible, we would aim to cut down the time between accessing the features required). A navigational flow was something I had not considered before in my projects and it was surprisingly helpful to keep me on track in creating the wireframes.