Week 12 — Research For/By Design — Part 5 — Final Reflection and Documentation
Final Thoughts
Overall, I think my group members and I were very satisfied with our final results as we completed the project thoroughly through out the past five weeks! Our topic, “Public Transportation”, was a huge social phenomenon that my group chose to research, and we have learned so much from many different perspectives that the topic could be explored on. As public transportation is essential in any society, this topic definitely intrigued every group member when it came to considering all issues surrounding the topic.
As we began to conduct our initial research of our project, we decided to create a focus area within the topic as it was easier to delve into a specific problem rather than tackling all other problems as a whole. So, our group designed and developed a specialized approach to resolve a particular issue. I think that narrowing the group’s overall focus was a great decision for the objectives of our project as we all knew that there were countless solutions to solve the countless problems that revolve around the topic. The prototype that we have developed may only solved a small piece of the problem but I think it truly gave enhancements to where the features could be greatly utilized by many users as our research was mainly based on users wants and needs.
The feedback that we have received during our final presentations was definitely a constructive response as it became clear that there were unclear points that were not defined well and there was more work to be done. It also made us think and question our overall message on our app if it was being delivered as it was intended to be. With the design ideas that we have integrated into our app, we mainly wanted to let users have the comfort of being alerted and notified of incidents and safety precautions while transiting between from one station to the next station. Though, it became a controversy as it appears that enabling the crime alert functionality may be designed to “scare” users away from riding the public transit. I was caught by surprise on the feedback but it gave me an insight that maybe perhaps the group and I could have refined our designs a bit more and showcase a well-defined purpose to entice the audience with our ultimate goal.
Looking back upon this project, I wished that there was more time to work on this project as it felt so short and limited based on the resources and time spent working on the project together as a group. I also felt that our primary research could have used more input from more users or the general public to get a good sense of what the general public would definitely need in resolving the issues with public transportation. Also, it would be great to go back and make reiterations of our project to develop better designs and focus more on the visual interface to make the prototype a bit more enticing rather than overwhelming with the overuse of red alerts on the live crime map screen. For future continuation of this project, I would like to conduct usability testing with users to see if the prototype gave a purpose to them and measure their approval rates. Then, ultimately going back into conducting more primary research to see what other possible enhancements that we could add or even take away from the app.
As I have said earlier, personally, I have gained so much from this experience as I learned to develop my wireframing/prototyping skills. With the addition of using Figma and InVision more extensively, I can say that I am getting more proficient on using these design tools. As I aspire to become a user experience designer, this project has definitely given me the “real” experience!
