Finalizing the Exquisite Application
written by Francisco Mejia, Ryan Abouchakra, Tyler Sorensen, Phonesavanh Le Inthongpradith
Final User Testing
Our final user testing helped us question our application from a different perspective. Before the final testing our application did not have a specific category that it would fit in. Our idea bounced from being a studying application that would have students as an audience or a leisure, self-help application, but why would we have flashcards? This question helped us find a better path for our application. We were able to say that our application is for both: students and vocabulary enthusiast. This finding reflects into our application by allowing the option to study to be subtle. People who don not want to study are not bombarded by notifications to study or a whole tab within our app that says “Study” which they would never click. Instead, we placed our option to study within a hamburger icon that allows for more options for a list.
Implementing the Final Prototype
The process of implementing our final prototype was interesting. We decided to take a step-by-step approach. The designers would brain storm, debate, and
criticize a specific characteristic of our application and once we all agreed on a decision, we passed that on to our coder for implementation. This led to an interesting dynamic because our coders would begin implementing but if some of our ideas were not realistic enough to be done in the time we had before the deadline, they would code something that was as close as possible and then the design team could reevaluate and consider other possible options. We decided to make the application visually simple because our main content is 100% text and having too many images or other types of distractions would take away from our goal: helping people learn new words.
Finally, the team was able to agree on the main pages of our application. The home screen would be the first thing a user would see, so we wanted our application to make a good first impression.
Therefore, we wanted the home screen to be the main hub of our application, where users would be able to access the core functionalities. Some of the core functionalities of our application included creating new lists, adding new words to lists, browsing for words, searching for words, and studying an entire list of words.
Our Experiences
As a group, we learned about the extensive design process. We concluded that we did not know how deep and rich of steps this process was yet, it resulted in a nice break down to complete the project. We discussed that this process taught us that we must be ready to pivot on our preconceived notions of what we think the user would like. We think that as aspiring UX|UI Designers or software engineers it is very important to keep this in mind. Sometimes we can become stubborn with our decisions or ideals but we figured that working with a team, bouncing off ideas, and helping each other allowed us to deliver an exquisite project.
