Hello Everyone and welcome back for Week 5!

This week, the module explorations in CS467 have us discussing the user-interface and prototyping. This is a super relevant topic as we delve into designing the front-end of our application. As mentioned, our application project provides the user with the ability to store their basic medical information, insurance info, prescriptions, and notes within an app. We intend for the app to be used by anyone over the age of 18 with a smartphone. Our target users are middle-aged or older, as they might have more medical conditions to keep track of and regular appointments which require the information.

As a team, we laid out the main features and flow of our program and designed prototypes that we could show to friends and family members to get their feedback. We conducted usability tests to see if our prototypes were successful in accomplishing what we wanted the app to do. This involved setting up tasks for the user to complete using our application. If they were unable to complete the tasks appropriately, we had to go back to the drawing board to improve things. We asked our user what features they liked or disliked and what they felt could be improved upon. We asked for feedback on the aesthetics of the app as well. Through this iterative process, we were able to devise a successful, thorough, and effective user-interface scheme before setting out to build the front-end of our app.

Designing and testing user-interfaces is a fun aspect of any web application. However, because it is not reliant on coding and because it more artistically driven, I think the importance of the user-interface can be overlooked. I feel that testing our prototypes early on will save us time down the road, since we will have made sure that the end result is effective and we would just need to emulate that into code.