An exploration into iterative design through designing an e-wallet app
Robert Ye
Description
Iterative design is a design methodology that continuously improves on a design on the basis of user testing(1). One design cycle generally encompasses four stages: prototyping, testing, evaluating, and making refinement. Obviously, this design process requires a significant amount of time and effort, since it demands you to go through a complete design cycle in order to make meaningful changes to the product. It makes me question whether designing iteratively is worth the time and effort and whether there is a diminishing return as the iteration comes to a certain point. To answer the question, I set off to design a mobile banking app called “Nova Pay” adopting the iterative design method. I used Balsamiq to make low-fidelity prototypes and Figma for high-fidelity ones.Then I did 3 rounds of usability testing and collected quantitative measurement data along the way to evaluate the usability of my app. After each round, I made modifications and improvements to my prototype. In the end, I found that the time and effort spent on iterative design is well worth the time and effort, and there is not a diminishing return in the three iterations i did. However, I do expect diminishing returns if I keep doing the usability tests, because the error score in the third generation is already zero. Moreover, there are definitely some constraints with my experiment: since I am a one-man team on this project with zero funding, the data collected might be too small to be considered significant.