This User Experience design project was the individual capstone for my Interfaces to Information Systems class at GSLIS.  It simulated portions of a full iterative design process as outlined in Jakob Nielsen’s “Usability Engineering“.

For the project, I chose to test and redesign the web-based interface of an application called Evernote, a multi-platform application competing in the note-taking and information organization space. I chose Evernote because I was a regular user who had ongoing frustrations with the web interface that I wished to interrogate, and because I was interested in surveying the larger landscape of online note-taking applications that was emerging at that time.

The project was divided into 3 stages: 1. A competitive analysis of multiple applications in the note-taking and organization space. 2. A user test of the application under consideration, with questions informed by what was learned from the competitive analysis. 3. A prototype redesign, which incorporated the feedback and knowledge gained in the first two exercises into an iterative redesign process.

I had already done extensive UX and front end development work going into this, but much of my knowledge was ad-hoc and fragmentary. This course and project helped to formalize and contextualize my knowledge of UX practices and techniques, and gave me a much firmer foundation for my work going forward.