I am extremely proud of myself and Liana for the creation of our learning tool, Techbox. We were lucky to be able to meet often and be in constant communication during our time creating the tool. We decided to focus on the A.D.S.T. curriculum very early in our design process but wanted to still come up with a tool that could be scaled to all subjects in education. I feel by deciding on our primary focus early on (A.D.S.T. curriculum), it made it a lot easier for us to come up with ideas.
During the design of the app, proto.io worked very well and had almost all the tools that we needed available. We really wanted to create a proof-of-concept app that functioned and could be shared easily to others. This would allow for us to share the prototype with others to eventually gather feedback down the line. Some aspects of proto.io required a bit of debugging (we had a lot of issues relating to scrolling), but we were able to iron out most of the bugs.
To determine the usability of our tool, we followed through with measures we mentioned in our proposal. We wanted an easy-to-use user interface that felt intuitive. The user should be able to figure out the application without needing any extra resources. One aspect that we would still like to implement would be a “spotlight” tutorial on the applications first run. We were unable to get this functionality to work with proto.io.
Reflecting on the design process, I wouldn’t change much. Most of the issues that came up related to proto.io, so I think we would have benefited from exploring proto.io earlier or trying a few more prototyping applications prior to committing to one. The rating aspect that we wanted to include worked very well and was easy to figure out (I am particularly proud of this functionality as it required a bit of problem solving). I learned that there are so many design decisions that must be made early in the process that often change throughout the creation of a tool. No matter how much planning a developer can do, there is always a curveball that can come up and changes the whole outcome of the project. This relate well to Woolgar (1990) as the decisions are made knowing that they will somewhat configure the user. Although it would have been a lot easier to not have scrolling pages on our application, we knew that users have been configured by other technologies to assume that they could scroll up and down. Due to this, we knew that we had to have scrolling pages since our users have been configured that way.
Liana and I worked together flawlessly throughout the entire process, and we complete equal amounts of work during each phase. Overall, I am very happy with the final product that Liana and I produced, and I feel like we worked very well together!
