Panel 1 Report

For the OBA application, I thought it was very interesting how the application designers added subtle design changes to implicate different information for different buses. For example, Borning showed the class a photo of a symbol that represented that a bus was GPS locatable. He almost seemed to assume that everyone would understand what it represented, but there was no annotation on the app screen to indicate that and when asked, the majority of the class said they would not have understood that symbol on their own. I thought it was interesting to see this sort of process in action as Borning has a very technical and less design-oriented background and it can possibly be deduced that more assumptions and weight is placed on the user end from that perspective.

In Barboza’s presentation, I found it interesting that they had such in depth examinations and interpretations of their users and how they navigate the Nordstrom website. She listed some buttons that confused users such as the “Shop” button to reach the inventory. She stated that users were confused that the button meant that you spend money by clicking it. It was interesting to me that something so small that I would imagine to be a point of confusion in the design stage can be readily found in user-testing. She showed us how important usability tests are to shaping systems for users.

In sprints, we usually will not have time to perform usability tests or talk to users about their experience using our products, so I learned that it is very important to take a step back from the work. It is very easy to get caught up in a direction or design idea and not look back to make any changes, but leaving that perspective and putting yourself in the shoes of a user can allow for more conscious systems, in sprints at least.