Lyft was a redesign project passed to us to develop. We started by choosing a critical path, our project scope. In a 10-week timespan, what would we choose to develop that would prove our skills as designers and teach us important technical skills? That option was the analytics route of the project. To manage and deliver data content to an average user, in a presentable and understandable way.
As a team we were challenged with developing a critical path from a given prototype. That critical path being the ride history page. We outlined tangible tasks and milestones such as an alpha and beta and sought to develop the Lyft prototype that we were given. In a timeline of 10 weeks we worked tirelessly to develop an online prototype. The purpose of the project was to give us valuable experience working in a team environment and to teach important technical skills. Our goal was to be able to meet deadlines while working within our given role as part of the team using Github and Microsoft Teams for development and communication.
The team obtained designs from the previous team’s work and improved on it. Our team based on our input and leftover UX testing notes adjusted the designs for future development.
For the design, the team decided to choose the “ride history data” as our critical path. This focused on Ride History allowing the user to view a monthly overview of the user’s ride data as well as a year overview.
With the final design we implemented what we set out to do and took into consideration any concerns about the design during our user testing. Some unique features that were used in creating the Lyft site were Google Maps and Google Graphs as they allowed the data that the user can see be dynamically driven and view in a modern and clean way.
As a team we believe this project of redesigning the Lyft site to be a success. We learned how we can work as a team and the process behind that. From a technical standpoint, we learned how to communicate and use GitHub as a team as opposed to individual use, as well as using PHP to make the site efficient and dynamic. In hindsight, in terms of development, we should have planned and structured out project thinking farther forward. Some challenges included link changes, file re-structuring, and naming conventions. Considering those far in advance would have been helpful and caused fewer tedious tasks. In terms of UX testing, we could have thought smaller in some cases, asking very basic questions such as ‘do you want this?’ instead of assuming the answer was yes. Overall, this project was a valuable learning experience for the team. As we learned what each of our roles were within the team, we have set out to develop a critical path for the Lyft redesign to develop the online prototype we have today.