Zach Wulf's Archive

For this project, I don’t feel that I did as strongly as the first app design. During the process, there were several different ideas of how the app should function, and none of them sounded appealing or like something I would use at all in real life. I decided to take a “locked-down” approach that let the app just aggregate data and decide what to generate for the user, which was simpler from a UI standpoint.

On a technical level I was rushed for time, and did not get every detail in that I wanted to. Conceptually I think I left out a lot by cutting features, but got the basic gist of the app across. There wasn’t much navigation to be confused by, and the loose ends I left could (reasonably) be filled in by extrapolation. If I had more time I would have added more graphs and filled in the signup/login and sharing pages.

I also struggled a lot with wondering who would actually use an app like this for more than a few days. This carried over into the design, as I really didn’t feel confident about what I was doing. I didn’t take a lot of risks from our process, or include features that I thought weren’t technically feasible. There were a lot of concepts that I took out of the process that helped influence the final comps, such as Evan’s icons and simplicity.

In this class I really feel that I have gained knowledge from the second half of a whole in UX/ID philosophy. Coming from a novice development background I had a general idea of functionality on the web, but not the subtle nuances of design that we take for granted. I believe I improved the most in exerting control over Photoshop/Illustrator and handling over concepts like grid structure and type, which I had never bothered with before in development. I also have a much greater appreciation for color, and how that can affect the entire visceral feel of an app or website.

As a whole I really enjoyed this semester, and although I don’t feel very confident about my technical ability in designing I took a lot out that will be applied in current and future projects.

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The core functions of this app would include:

– Passive usage data pulled from the user’s phone, including call logs, text, email, gps, facebook and twitter information, as well as time spent in each individual app.

– The ability to display this information over days/weeks/months/years, or filter by specific app usage

– A “heatmap” mode of places the user has been to frequently

– A “random” mode where 2 unrelated statistics are pulled from the database and generated side-by-side in an infographic on the lockscreen. The user could up/down vote random graphics to factor into which statistics are more heavily pulled. If the user likes the current infographic, they can visit either the app or an online website which keeps a history of the 10 most recently generated graphics.

– Infomatic

– Infojam

– GraphYou

– LifeGraph

– Datarific

With the Infographic App, the user will be able to:

1) Passively use all of their regular phone features (Facebook, Twitter, calling, texting, etc.) and procedurally generate an infographic that summarizes their usage habits on command.

1a) Adjust the data presented for different periods of time or by individual app usage.

2) Share this infogrphic at anytime via a number of social channels.

3) Input additional information that cannot be captured by a phone into the system (exercise routines, eating habits, etc.) and specify what kind of information diagram should be generated.

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.