P4 Reflection

I learned a lot of extremely useful information on this project and (in my opinion) improved my technical and conceptual design skills. I felt very comfortable with this project because it supplemented ideas I had learned from my Human Computer Interaction class and forced me to apply them from a visual design standpoint, as opposed to a functional design approach.

As far as weaknesses go, I am still working on the subtle nuances of Photoshop, mainly gradients, giving surfaces a 3-dimensional feel, highlights and shadows, creating icons and textures. I spent a great deal of time with the pen tool for icons in Illustrator, which is something I do not have much experience in. Working between vector and bitmap programs when making icons is difficult, and it shows in some of the logos I designed for the main menu options, as well as my main logo. Because I am not a regular iOS user I found it difficult to transplant the behaviors associated with Android over to that platform, and my app really feels more like a multi-platform app than an iOS app.

Conceptually I feel pretty strong about this project. There were several UX concepts that I needed to imply to the user, and I think most were successful. For example, the entire app thematically revolves around color coding because it contains such a huge repository of information. Each category of location (or events) is associated with one color, and this carries over into the deepest menu. There was also the behavior of sidescrolling through businesses that I needed to convey, as well as the clickability of certain items. Hopefully the design suggests these things to the user.

Through the process of this project I saw a lot of improvement conceptually on the kinds of problems my app needed to solve. It started out as a local social network, but as I gathered feedback from interviewees and later the class it shifted into more of a quick-draw database app with a wiki style editing system. Through the wireframes and sketching I realized that a full website wasn’t going to work because it wasn’t really needed.