Lost and found: Lessons learned from a design retrospective

Reflection is critical for understanding how designs evolve and the factors that impact that evolution. This is especially meaningful for projects that have taken place over a long period of time and with consistent overall direction. In this case study, we reflect back over the design of an information gathering and management system built for students in higher education. We demonstrate how users can be involved in various ways over a development period that spans many years; we show that designs of different fidelities can effectively garner user feedback; and we illustrate the impact of multiple influences, including users, research team members, and resource limitations on the overall transformation of the system. We conclude with a series of lessons learned that we hope will help future researchers plan and execute their own design-implement-evaluate lifecycles.