Progress
Jozie Sands's Archive
Interview Summary
I talked to people who run longer distances and a few who are training for half marathons. They spend a significant portion of their time running and they see a lot of repetition in their routes. They said their runs get boring after a while, and they would like to be able to change it up easily.
The people who were training for distance races said they would like to be able to map a longer or more difficult route easily. They found that it was hard to increase the distance of their route without a lot of mapping unless they run on a track which many found boring.
When I asked them what other benefits they would like to see in the app, most of them said they would like the app to keep track of their times and allow them to make a running schedule.
Interview Questions
Do you run? How often/far?
How long have you been a runner? Treadmill, track, trail or neighborhood?
Do you keep track of routes you run?
How many routes do you run regularly? How do you find them?
Have you tried managing routes with any apps? Why/why not? Did it help?
If there was an app generated new routes for you and let you share/save/rate them would you try it out? Why/why not?
Would it benefit you if neighborhoods were rated according to safety?
Would it benefit you if the app generated a difficulty for a route using geographical data?
What would the ideal app help you accomplish?
ideas
Newspaper Assignments Manager — iPad
Allows members of a newspaper staff to make, track and sort assignments. It will be optimized for the staggered deadlines that come with web-first publishing, and the newspaper staff be able to ask eachother questions and receive push notifications concerning their story assignments.
Intramural game manager — iPhone
Allows students to see upcoming games, stats, and tournament brackets from their phone. Sends notifications before games and when another teams win/loss affects your standing or schedule.
Running app — iPhone
Helps runners manage and created routes. Routes are generated based on the distance and difficulty the user selects. The difficulty of the course is determined by the app using geographical data. The app also pulls safety data from the number of police reports in a certain area. The user can save, rate, share and repeat routes. The app uses the user’s ratings to predict how they will react to other routes.
P3 reflection
I feel good about this project – technically and conceptually.
I spent more time sketching for this project, and I can tell that it helped. My project felt more cohesive from the beginning and I didn’t have to spend as much time making all the details match up. I also have a couple other blog themes ready to mock up for my portfolio.
I’m getting really comfortable in Photoshop and I really enjoy working in it. I think the elements I create are starting to look less clunky. Also, I’ve started to notice details on websites I visit. Once I notice these things I am getting better at figuring out how to make them.
While working on this project and lately at the Optimist, I noticed that I am becoming more sensitive to hierarchy. I used to have to make myself think about managing levels of hierarchy, but recently I have noticed that I have a couple of levels defined right off the bat. While I was working on the first project in this class, I noticed how bad I was at setting leading. I’ve made an effort to improve that, and I think it’s getting better.
I haven’t figured out another specific area of design to focus on, but I think it helps to find one area to keep in the front of my mind while I design so I can make it more intuitive.
