Reflection: Week #6 – Portfolio Work

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After a long few weeks working to prototype the Lunch Money Buddy app, I put the final touches on them to submit something that I felt would be ready for some task based usability testing. But more on that next week.

To finish off this penultimate week of the class, I took all of the work that I had done for this application, including planning items at the front end of the project, and tried to present it in a way that provided just enough detail and insight into my process and artifacts. I’ve had this website for a long time, and it’s been in and out of “construction” for as long as I’ve owned it; even though I’ve wanted to start highlighting my work I either didn’t feel I had the time or was unclear of what I could show from my previous jobs (there’s actually a really interesting AMA coming up about this). So this opportunity to actually use this site for it’s intended purpose was equal parts exciting and daunting.

I really had no idea how to potentially structure a piece like this, so learning about the PARL principle (Problem, Action, Results, Learnings) was extremely helpful. I tried to follow this format to lay out the information about this project, but I felt that without some of the business context, I couldn’t provide a lot of detail regarding the “Problem” section. The rest of the letters in PARL weren’t too difficult to complete, but as with other types of assignments I have worked on, I had to figure out how much I wanted to balance text with imagery and then make a determination around the amount of information necessary to provide a clear yet succinct picture.

Like anything else, feedback and iteration can be the key to this; I hope that the feedback people share will inform future versions of that portfolio piece (it’s very easy to update) as well as how I create future portfolio items for the rest of the work I’ve created in this program.

Reflection: Week #5 – Feedback Sandwich

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Before I finish up the prototype I am working on for this class next week, the directive has been to provide feedback to others in the class. I should start by saying that I don’t think I am any good at giving feedback, even though I have been told otherwise. I think the issue is that I have a hard time feeling like what I am providing is valuable, actionable, but also constructive. The assignment did give some level of a rubric for providing feedback, but because the scope of these prototypes can be large, I felt that just sticking to that wouldn’t have provided the level of thought for a fellow classmate to actually use.

So I made sure to go through each prototype that I reviewed screen by screen, and wrote my thoughts on the layout, information, content, interactive elements, animations, and overall usability. I also tried to go through the app using a “natural” task based on the journey maps that we completed, as well as from the information provided in the personas. I ended up producing long bulleted lists, but encountered some doubt when finished:

  1. I had a lot of questions – Because there was a lot that was left open when creating these prototypes, I wasn’t exactly clear on what assumptions were made, what the imagined business rules were, and the complete vision of the classmate’s project. I tried to incorporate these into my feedback to provide an anchor in case I was off base from their intention.
  2. I had to recheck myself for tone – Communicating on the internet can be difficult, especially when you are delivering critical feedback. The idea of the “feedback sandwich” (any negative feedback surrounded by positive feedback) was never something that I thought was that effective, but I do see the benefit of calling out positive things throughout the process of critique. I wanted to make sure that I was balanced, fair, and respectful. I think I did a good job, but like with any type of writing/publishing I do, I made sure to read and re-read multiple times.

Overall, I am hopeful that my classmates will be able to take at least one thing from the feedback I provided to improve their prototypes. Now I am about to take the feedback given to me (and how I received that is probably fodder for an additional post…) and make some final changes before publishing the final version that will be ready for testing!

Reflection: Week #4 – Prototypical Prototyping?

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Last week I spent a lot of time learning Sketch so that I could use a new tool to effectively turn my wireframes into something digital. This week was more of the same as I imported my Sketch files into Proto.io to try to create a very basic, first draft of the prototype that I will eventually test. What followed was a long week of trial, error, frustration, recreation, and tweaking.

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Reflection: Week #3 – Sketching (But not the pencil kind…)

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I’ve had the opportunity to do some wireframing in my Information Architecture classes while in the Kent State UXD program, so the thought of sitting down and putting ideas that were on paper to pixels isn’t so foreign to me. However, I’ve decided to take the sketching I did last week and try a new program to create the wireframes… can you guess which one?

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