Panel 1 Report

One Bus Away

In Alan Borning’s presentation, he talked about how their team developed interaction design prototyping for OBA. He also talked about some obstacles they encountered when developing the app as well as how they solved these problems. I found it interesting that One Bus Away was a school project at first, but now the App was widely used in many major cities in US. The methods Alan and his team used to design the App are same as what we did in Sprint, including creating scenarios, paper prototyping, user researches and beta tests. One major problem Alan encountered when developing the App interface was that users were confused by real-time transit and scheduled time transit. They solved the problem by stating scheduled arrivals, changing real-time arrivals display to different color, using negative sign to indicate bus already took off etc. One aspect of the project that stood out to me was that the interface of App was modified over time since its establishment. Another thing that amazed me was that App developers were from different academic areas, such as computer science and metropolitan development etc.

Nordstrom

Laura Barboza’s presentation taught me how important usability testing was. The case Laura introduced was using usability test results to tell website designers what shall be changed in Nordstrom’s Early Access Sale website to make it more user-friendly. The user tests were done on computer or iPhone. Laura and her team tried to find out if regular customers understood what Early Access was. One aspect of the project that stood out to me was that usability testing was not a one-time thing. The tests had to go through couple times to generate a perfect result. Laura said that her team went for three rounds to achieve the final website interface. Designers changed the font and color based on the users test results to make “Early Access” attractive.

Reflection

From these professional projects, I learned that interaction design prototyping and usability testing needed to be combined and balanced to make user-friendly products. For my paper prototype spring, I could use draft paper prototype to do usability test and then changed my design based on the test results. For my oven usability test, I could do coupled rounds of test and see what my test lacked of after each round. I also learned that even a font or a color could change the interaction design dramatically. Details make the design. The most important thing I learned from OBA project might be putting effort into every project, cause you never know if your design could make a difference in real world.