When we first started this project, we had no clear idea of how we wanted to go about creating a project to help users who are struggling to balance their school, work, and other responsibilities, especially in the midst of a pandemic. We were also still learning the user-centered design process in the class. However, with the resources HCDE 318 provided for us, and through meeting and working with such a talented team, we came out of this project with hands-on experience, a project to add to our portfolios, and a better understanding of what it means to design for our users in mind throughout every step of the process.

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We learned it can be easy to lose sight of our design goals and requirements when we are deep into a project. In the future, it will be important to keep returning to those like a checklist throughout the iterative design process. We also learned how to collaborate with other designers through communicating our thoughts effectively, receiving feedback, sharing ideas, and consolidating them to produce a product that everyone is satisfied with.

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If we had more time, we would have adapted our app to prioritize small, local businesses and ensure that historically marginalized groups are represented. The current form of our app requires the user to search/filter for specific needs, but we would like to make a more explicit section that gives representation for those who are often ignored or forgotten. This could be done by expanding on how workplaces are suggested, filtered, tagged, and rated. We would also like to iterate and expand more on our Friends page and the overall social element of the app. This was a main selling point of our app, as it directly addressed some of our potential users’ needs that were revealed by our interviews. If we were to continue to iterate on the design, we would prototype the Friends user flows next.

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As a team, we had consistent communication, equally distributed workloads, good dynamics, and a good sense of understanding. However, our biggest challenge was in scheduling, as we sometimes failed to create a good timeline of meeting times and working hours. Thus, what we would do differently next time is to include a work back schedule for our deliverables to plan our time better. Also, we can use some sort of device or application that could help manage our time and schedule our meetings. Although we had some things we could improve upon as a team, we cannot imagine any other team to go on this journey with.

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Thank you for reading!