However much time you think you'll need, triple it.
Researching and designing an interface over the course of a single college semester is a daunting task. Doing so while simultaneously learning about what methods I would be using as I went for the first time was challenging, to say the least. Balancing all of this with three other classes, a job, and a plethora of complicated personal issues had me pulling all-nighters at least once a week.
My problem, like most people's, wasn't that I didn't have enough time, but that I wasn't managing it properly. My group constantly found that we had scheduled only an hour for a task that wound up taking almost triple that time. Specifically, there were five areas where my group found that we just didn't book enough time to complete our assignments to the best of our abilities
1. You won't always find what you're looking for while researching.
The first speed bump we hit was the week of our very first deliverable. Our group knew we didn't want to do a contextual inquiry for our project, so we began researching comparable interview techniques that might be better suited to our needs. Unfortunately, the perfect answer isn't always found in the top link of the Google search.We ended up doing a semi-structured interview, but it didn't feel quite as unbiased as a contextual inquiry because we were still asking questions about the things we wanted to know about rather than naturally observing the things we needed to know about.
If we had budgeted more time towards researching alternatives, we might have been able to find a solution that worked well with our project, but still provided the level of flexibility I was looking for. This isn't to say we didn't ultimately learn what we needed to know, only that that first step remains one of my bigger regrets about this project, and could have been completely avoided if we'd only had the time to really deep dive into more user experience research techniques.
2. It takes longer than you think to schedule an interview.
People are busy, especially on college campuses. Whether it's students, faculty, or staff, scheduling an interview is going to be difficult, especially if the interview will take longer than half an hour. Finding an interviewee is going to be even more difficult if it's done at the last minute, which, due to the unavoidable nature of this course, it always was for our group.For us, finding people to interview was challenging, partially because our project only allowed us to interview a small portion of the student body, and partially because we only gave ourselves a few days to find someone. Customarily, I hate making plans less than a week in advance, so asking people to block out a not insignificant part of their day to do me a favour with so little notice didn't feel great.
When scheduling interviews, especially so last minute, it will always take more time than you think you need, because you have to bring in people from outside the project. They're doing you a favour here, so you have to work around their schedules. This means it will take time to find people who not only have time to make for you, but whose schedules also match yours. Juggling the schedules of a dancer, an athlete, and a theatre tech was already enough of a challenge, without trying to bring in more people. You would think this would have been obvious to me, but I just really underestimated how much preparation three interviews might take.
3. Nothing you think is obvious actually is.
Interviews may be difficult, but they're only the first step on a road of poor time management. Usability tests are even more of a favour to ask than interviews; they take longer, and they require significantly more effort on the part of the participant. Worst of all, they will always go wrong.When we did our usability tests, our buttons all used pictures instead of words to convey their functions. Each test, without fail, participants were confused about the purposes of the various buttons. We tried changing the icons many times. A red flag became an exclamation mark became a white flag, to no avail. The symbols that seemed obvious to us just didn't translate. Not only did we have to plan and schedule these tests, but we also had to make significant changes to our design in between each one, a factor we hadn't considered when planning how much time to give to each test.
Things that might seem intuitive to won't always translate to someone who isn't intimately familiar with the product as the designers. Our budgeted twenty or so minutes for redesign quickly turned into many hours of debate and brainstorming. Always budget way more time than the test will take for redesigns because I can almost guarantee that users will be tripped up by even the simplest things. As it turns out, nothing that is designed from scratch is going to be all that simple.
4. Computers are evil evil machines intent on ruining your life.
It doesn't bode well for me that I am a prospective computer science major in a computer science course and this is one of my main takeaways, but regardless of my very poor life choices, it's just the truth that there will always be technical difficulties at the worst of times.More than once, I found myself with what I had thought was a nearly complete assignment that I had been tasked with putting on the website at 11pm the night before it was due, only to realise that the formatting was completely wrong. Even when we thought our assignments were perfect, there were times when it took over an hour to figure out why an image wasn't loading right or a table wasn't appearing. It was frustrating and stressful, and often the result of a careless mistake. Nonetheless, there were a few Wednesdays where I didn't start my Russian homework until after midnight, and really whose fault was that?
Internet will go down, laptops will die, and code will break. These are all facts of life, and leaving any aspect of a project, no matter how simple it may seem, until the last minute only left me with a migraine and some mild sleep-deprivation-induced hallucinations. Trust me, I've learned this lesson several times over the course of my academic career, nothing has ever or will ever actually take less than five minutes.
5. Stuff happens.
Keeping with the theme of things unexpectedly going wrong, the mysterious world of technology isn't always to blame. Especially when working in group projects, sometimes stuff just happens. Someone flakes on a responsibility or is late to a meeting or just doesn't submit quality work. People are unreliable and the universe is cruel.There were definitely times over the course of the semester when something just came up. There's no accounting for these things perfectly, but it never hurts to add just a little bit of a buffer when planning to avoid any major problems. Especially as busy college students with other responsibilities, all three of us had some issue or another over the course of the semester with sticking to a proposed plan, and some more wiggle room would have been a welcome addition.
Like I said, there is really no accounting for things; major things might just mean a deadline is missed, but it would have been wise on our end if our group had maybe just tried to get our work done even just a day or so earlier than we have been over the course of the semester. As someone who had never done a big group project like this before, I think this really has been my biggest takeaway. Time management is already hard enough, and for projects as complex as co-designing an interface, I really have found that there is no such thing as starting a project too early.
Whether because planning is hard, people are unreliable, design is unintuitive, technology is the worst, or life is just hard, something will always come up, and projects will always take longer than expected. Everyone wins when a scheduled three hour meeting ends halfway through. Finish assignments a week in advance if necessary. It really hurts no one.
While this is a lesson that this design course really helped instill in me, I definitely recognise the universal nature of this lesson to. Not only does it apply to every class, but also really every project, across all disciplines and levels of study. Working with other people is messy, but it really is worth it for the depth of ideas and talents it can bring to a project.