Week Six - Feeling the Heat

Things could be better. Although we are making progress now, Assignment three is still behind time, and we're already spending almost all our time on it.

We received quite a harsh critique during Monday's (21/9) review, which was a bit frustrating because as a "handicapped team" I felt that we were trying our best. We were down by a member from the start, and the team mate we put in charge of backend has responsiveness problems, among other issues.

For the remaining two of us, we could only try harder. The feedback we received placed a lot of focus on UX, and our lack of clarity of purpose. Our app was initially focused on building the basic functionality, in part because I was in charge of front-end, and I hadn't managed to do much because of the number of deliverables I had the past weekend. My focus from Monday to today was to improve on these, and it seems from today's review that it paid off.

Some things to learn from this experience:

1. The importance of a designer:
   I realise that in assignment 1, we did not make use of our designer well. In this assignment, having a designer to manage the graphic assets, workflows and layouts could have helped us a lot. In a sense I had to do both design and code while building the front-end, and while it could seem more efficient, I felt that it made things slower, because we had to frequently debate the alternative UI/UX options. Having someone to focus on running through the user experience and come up with what to build would have helped form a solid direction for the team, and allow the developers to focus solely on how to build the features. To this end, I'd think that having a designer who can actually run the development code (i.e. knows Git and can follow instructions to run a localhost) would be a big plus point.
2. The benefits of having a code-savvy designer:
   While some may say that "designers should just design, and coders should just code," I would say that it helps to understand how things work when designing for them. At times, I felt that I had to make design calls that balance between difficulty and overall UX. The perfect layout or animation could be much harder and more time-consuming to build, and from my experience most designers would not know how to make such a decision.
3. The importance of being explicit:
   Make things as clear as possible. Colin questioned a lot of features, especially when they did not match his mental image of it. In particular he questioned the purpose of our app, because our landing page (and app in general) had no explanations. Our clean UI and short labels meant nothing, because he did not know what they were for. We have since added a tutorial introduction, and used guiding verbs instead. An example of this is our input page, which is one long sentence broken down into each individual input ("We want to share a cab from ___ to ___ using the ___ route").