Learnings & Takeaways
The Most Important Learning: How to Work with a Team
My biggest takeaway is learning how to collaborate with a group of people of diverse skills and work styles. We have had many issues related to teamwork, but we were able to solve them together by improving our communication mechanism and developing a health team environment. We gradually learned when to work together and when to divide up, what to prioritize in discussion and what to leave up to the person in charge. Most importantly, we established a team norm that is collaborative, proactive, and warm.
We Could Have Done Better: Define and Scope Earlier
A noticeable part of our project is the pivot we took in the middle when defining a target user group. From the inception of the project, we have had concerns about the online shopper demographic being too general. Nevertheless, we did not know a way to frame it differently, so we followed the standard UX process and did all the work in the beginning which did not turn into fruition of a solution. Although this is indeed a valuable lesson to learn, we could have challenged the prompt and assumption and focused our effort earlier on.
If I Had More Time: Test Usability and Efficacy of the Solution
Since our client is a startup and our project is more of a product design challenge, rather than a UX design project, we spent the majority of our time coming up with conceptual designs. Through user testing, we learned that our solution is Desirable and appeals to our target user. However, we did not have time to do a longitudinal study to determine if the product is actually Useful and Usable in the everyday workflow.