I thought our project turned out pretty successful in the end, especially given the bumpy start. Especially towards the end, I worked heavily on the design of our app. This involved creating sketchy screens for most of the rider/driver flows, making our style tile, creating the high fidelity screens on Figma based on sketchy screens, and creating the clickable prototype. I also brainstormed a lot on how to structure and organize the role prototype with Fauzan. I thought it was interesting to that our problem and the need for a solution was validated so early but also that a successful product didn’t exist widely on campus. Looking at previous iterations, it seems a lot of the failure came down to implementation and usability (ex. very slow and laggy, unintuitive design/navigation from what we could find).
I learned about how valuable interviews are in uncovering ideas I had missed. For instance, in our early interviews, some folks made us aware of the safety concern. It seems our team had naively and dangerously thought that Stanford students are “safe” by nature. In designing the screens for our app on Figma, I realized how difficult it can be to create an app. There were just so many flows or paths in such a little screen/space. It was hard thinking about how to lay out the different icons and text such that we could capture all of these flows in a way that was intuitive and not too cluttered.
If we had more time, I would:
- Do some usability testing with our clickable prototype. As mentioned above, designing the app to have all of the paths and actions users can take was difficult. Some things that would be crucial to test is whether people know where to go to write reviews, how to view a driver’s rating and profile [some of our safety-enhancing features], how to schedule trips, etc. These will be to test our main functionalities as well as to better ensure for safety of all of our users. Another thing to test here is our design choice to have the driver and user account switchable through a click of a button (like switching tabs) at the top of the screen (see image attached). We will need to see if the current design makees it easy for bad actors to do things that could benefit themselves.
- Focus on other ways to ensure safety within our app and better understand how that will be represented in both our look-and-feel as well as our implementation. As mentioned throughout the reflection, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to promote and ensure the safety of our users. If we had more time, I would like to implement different safety measures we wanted to take and test them with users to see whether the way we implement them or design them on the app is intuitive and actually makes some sort of an impact. Real MVP-type testing with the app might also uncover newer ideas.
