Reflections UI course

This blogpost contains our reflections on the User Interfaces course:

Lieven
Last year, I took the course ‘HCI: principles and design’ at KTH (Stockholm). The iterative UI design using both paper and digital prototypes was part of the course. We even had a small project to put it into practise. That was just enough to get started. The UI course I took here as part of my HCI program went far deeper, mostly because we had to work on a real-life scale. The constant need for reporting and feedback from others helped to stay alert and question the course we were following at the time. On evaluating our project, I see two shortcomings, mentioned before. For starters, we don’t have that much test users. I do however believe we extracted useful information of our subject. I must admit I’m rather reluctant to prompt users too much, which might be another explanation for our limited test audience. Secondly, we focused not enough on efficiency, but on functionality instead. As argued before, prototyping has its limits, but that shouldn’t have stopped us of at least trying to incorporate it more.
Finally, the methodology and the user’s active role in it are two important things I take with me from this course, together with a reinforced striving to design in a user-centred way – after all, he or she is the one measure of quality that matters.

Yasin
With this course we have learned how to evaluate and design a user friendly application by applying methods that are proven to be successful in the past years. For achieving this we iterate our test phases with the users and look for problems and solutions thereby. So each iteration brings an improvement to our application. Overall this whole process leads us to our goal which is to make an application which users have a good satisfaction and experience with. By following these methodology we were able to design an application which provided a solution to information overload. If we were not given any of these methods we would probably end up with making something that wasn't really a good solution and thereby losing too much time. The course itself is very structured and demands continuous involvement. By giving results via blogs we were able to get some feedback and apply changes to our design if needed. At first this seems time consuming but in the end we have seen how important this really was. Because finding flaws in time instead of waiting till the end saves us all so much headache. For those who are interested in human centered design should definitely take a look at this course. It’s really worth it and you’ll have so much fun thanks to the interactiveness of it. By reading and writing comments on students’ blogs we were able to find some issues with their and our application. Sometimes we made comparisons with those designs that were similar to ours (e.g. team Sjiek’s Focus) and Incorporated some of their ideas to ours while giving them some suggestions as well. In the end this helped us a lot and student colleagues served as expert evaluators.

Ward
I think that this course was very useful in the way that we that we were exposed to the a real-life usability design process. At first I thought that the evaluation techniques presented in the course and used during the project were rather theoretical. But as told in the presentation of the Capgemini people, things like paper prototyping in an iterative design are used to develop real-life applications. In this course we were obligated to work actively on the project during the entire semester and this is definitely a necessity if you want to create a good user interface.
I think a strong point of our project is that followed a structured approach in each iteration. By continuously checking whether problems from the previous iteration were solved and whether new problems arose, I believe we were able to create a decent interface. Of course, if it was a business application we were creating, some more iterations would follow. Also when looking back, I would start testing the efficiency of the application sooner. Sadly this wasn’t possible since our implementation wasn’t ready at the time.
By being obliged to read and comment on other blogs, we were able to see where other groups were in the development process and what interesting insights they obtained. Also by getting feedback from other groups we received some additional helpful insights for the development process.