Lessons learned

What we learned from the project

As we have designed our address book we have found out that it is a lot harder than one can imagine creating a good design. Taking into consideration all the usability principles it is not an easy task when designing an address book. We also found out that it is impossible to make the design correct at the first attempt. Designing an interface requires an iterative process. One must think things over and evaluate and test the ideas among the group members before the design can come to an end. We also felt that it is almost impossible to create "the perfect" design. Since the color display on the notebook is relatively small it is not easy to fit all the functions in the application window. Therefore one always have to compromise between the usability principles and making things visible when designing a graphic user interface.

We have taken influence from other applications when designing the address book. Sometimes that have been useful but there have also been situations where we have been trapped in an existing design. To rethink and make it better have not always been easy.

When we first started to design our address book we thought a lot of how all the functions were to be implemented. Now, with more knowledge about designing interfaces, we know that this was a mistake. We should not have worried about that since we missed functions and had to rework the design several times. Instead we should had paid more attention to the usability principles and less attention to implementation problems.

It was good to do a heuristic evaluation on the design. Unfortunately we felt that it was hard doing it on our own project. It would definitely had been better to let someone outside our project team evaluate the design. If we had done that we would probably had better opportunities to make the design even better. Unfortunately the time has been too limited.

We think it has been hard to design an interface that is supposed to be used with a stylus. That is because we have not had a stylus to work with and that limited our chances to design the address book properly in the beginning. Also no one in the group have used a stylus so it is not easy to understand exactly how it works.

Finally we found out that it is not easy to create error messages since they need to be concise and clear. One must be very aware of what the message need to tell the users and be really good at expressing it.

Needed improvements

It would have been good if the address book could give the user the opportunities to sort not only by last name. Maybe that had made it easier to search on other attributes. Searching can be done either in the address book or in the Campus server. It would have been nice if the search could have been done in both at the same time. But these functions may be seen as advanced features.

The search result list and the contact list should be bigger. As it is now the user has to scroll a lot if there are many names displayed in those windows. Scrolling always takes time and should, if possible, be avoided. Unfortunately the limited space does not give the opportunity to have a bigger window and therefore we have scroll bars. A possibility is of course to use pop up windows. We felt, though, that such windows should have made the address book a little bit harder to use when the windows are stacked on top of each other. That is because they hide information.


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