Panel Report

What I have learned…

We had two guest speakers for last week’s lecture — Alan Borning and Laura Barboza.

Alan talked about the One Bus Away app which I am very familiar with. I commute to school everyday so I use One Bus Away on a daily basis. After Alan’s presentation, I acknowledged that One Bus Away is made by a small team, that’s why the initial interface wasn’t that good. One thing that really stood out to me is how complex it is to communicate with transit company to get the GPS information of a bus. I have never thought this is difficult, for example every time I open One Bus Away and I see bus 44 is coming in 5 minutes, I just feel like this is how things supposed to be, but I never thought about the process behind. Prototyping is not as easy as it seems, it takes a lot of efforts. And Alan also taught me nothing comes out perfectly on the first try, you need to keep editing. It is very true, I can tell that One Bus Away is having huge improvements from time to time because I use it everyday and always update to the newest version of it.

Laura talked about her experience of usability testing of Nordstrom’s Anniversary Sale. It surprised me that they actually did 3 usability tests and one thing that stood out to me is Laura showed us picture of different stages of their designing, so we can see the changes and improvements throughout the process. Usability test is being definitely helpful. I also like how she actually gave scenarios to the tester, which makes the observation easier.

After hearing their presentation, I feel like I have a lot of things to improve. First I think I should present my prototype to potential users and ask about their thoughts, because the design is centered at users. Also, if I were do a usability test again, I’d learn from Laura to give my tester actual scenarios, which would be easier for us developer to observe and also easier for the tester to talk out loud so that we could find out what need to be improved.