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Gan Shi

Panel Report NO.1

  • Reflection on OBA:

When I first arrived in Seattle in 2014, the top 3 powerful and practical apps people recommended to me were Yelp, Chase and OneBusAway. Everyone around me was using this app. And I would never believe that an app, as popular as those fad social apps, was just a project of two local graduate students until I listened to the presentation given by Alan Borning, who was the instructor of the co-creator of this app. For an app that provides geo-tagged photos, bus information, and time schedules etc., when OBA’s designers did paper prototyping, they always put their idea in emulated real scenarios to optimizing their prototype. One thing that impressed me was Alan still could easily raise deficiencies and prospects of fixing them. This definitely showed his and the designing team’s spirit of never being satisfied and keeping progressing.

  • Reflection on Nordstrom:

Based on Laura’s introduction of Nordstrom’s Anniversary Sale last year, I noticed that users experience researchers like her who works in a big commerce company often did “passive” usability testing on users’ behavior. By that, I meant they typically did not ask users to do surveys or actively and directly gather information and feedback from users. Instead, sometimes they concluded and made decisions in according to users natural reactions with given circumstances. I personally view this as a smart and reasonable strategy of usability testing, in that it maximally mimics the real-world scenario so that designers could modify the product in the most proper way.

  • My takeaway idea:

If I were to redo my paper prototyping, I probably would spend more time on modifying details with the spirit of never being satisfied. I should identify myself as not only a designer, but a user. And I should go find a place to emulate the situation that a real user would encounter. Query myself as OBA’s designers always do.

The “passive” usability testing is the lesson I learned from Laura’s speech. This strategy allows people to very efficiently collect considerable amount of high quality data. If I had another opportunity to run usability testing, I would set up a scenario, and observe and record users’ behavior without informing them this is a task.