Archive for ‘Project 4’

The last two projects in this class were my favorites. I enjoy the consistency in screen size and color that comes with mobile products – Apple ones at least. I also enjoy the conceptual structure of apps.

I like the increased level of control I have over the user in an app setting. They have to enter into the environment of the app through the same path. In a website, the user can drop into any page they have a link to. That is fun to deal with in its own way, but also a little annoying.

Throughout the process, I’ve gotten better at – and come to enjoy – wireframing. I find it is makes the design process smoother and I end up with a better final product.

I know all the concepts I need to know to work in Photoshop, but I need to practice different styles. Right now most of my designs are pretty flat because I don’t really get along with gradients. They always look a little clunky or non-existent. I need to keep working on that.

This project has been interesting for me because I feel like some strengths of mine were brought out while at the same time I had many weaknesses challenged. Throughout the planning phase (doing the interviews, coming up with the task list, making the wireframes, and coming up with project ideas) I felt very at home and was really enjoying myself. While I did need to expand my ideas a bit and tweak my task list to fit the goals of the class, up through the wireframes I still felt very confident about the outcome of the project.

When working on the visual fragments, I have simply had the same problems that I have had throughout the class so far – trying to remember photoshop techniques, paying attention to subtle hierarchical details in the type, and avoiding awkward negative space. I do feel like, however, that I have improved since the previous projects, as I was able to jump into the design of the fragments more quickly, and was able to push myself to come up with varied ideas.

When it came to designing the final comps, however, I began to struggle a lot more. One mistake that I made on the wireframes is that I assumed the iPhone screen could fit more text/buttons on it than it actually could. When making the final comps, I was forced to pick various text blocks and features to leave out of the final design. While I still was able to produce a useful application, I ended up having to cut out some features that I would have preferred to leave in the application.

I also struggled with running behind in this project. Early on in the project I got sick, and while I am mostly better now, I did not get caught up on all my work quickly enough. While this was fine in that I was eventually able to get all my work done, I missed out on several class critique sessions, which I know have been extremely valuable so far in helping my designs turn out with better color choice, better feature integration, and better management of sizing and use of negative space. While I was still able to create a project that I was satisfied with, I will work very hard to make sure I am ready for class critiques on the next project, because that help is extremely valuable for me.

After each project I feel like I’m getting to know photoshop to a greater extent, which has made projects entirely easier to complete and to create new possibilities of portraying an idea. I also employed Illustrator by importing smart objects into Photoshop–learned that, that creates a cleaner look to the objects when saved. Before I would make the mistake of creating everything in photoshop and end up with pixilated images. I felt very rushed on this project and had a concept at the beginning of keeping things simple  and flat, with outlines and as much directness as possible. But I think not venturing out into other styles may have hurt me. I like the end look and feel, but I can’t help but wonder if it could have been better. I feel that my work this semester has been sub par for what I know I can do. They are not stumbling blocks, but experiences to learn from along the way.

I hope to improve upon the user experience by showing friends and asking if it is intuitive or confusing to them. I do want to rearrange some elements to better utilize the space. I would like to have just worked on the whole thing to improve aspects of the project. Simplifying and cleaning details. Dealing with negative space better and working even more on the user experience side of the app, which is pretty key to the project. I hope to discuss this with you (Mike) to see about other solutions to increase the visceral affect in a positive way.

Well now that I have a new computer with a hardshell case and protective keyboard cover I feel confident that I will be able to deliver process work in a timely manner and not feel so overwhelmed. I have learned that I work at slower pace than others. My attention to detail attributes to that, but other designers are also meticulous if not more so, but produce their work, and in a greater quantity, at a much quicker rate. It’s been very frustrating. I need to continually improve my timetable of what I can complete in order to utilize my skills to their fullest and to improve. I’m looking forward to the next project and hoping that I can create something that could be incredibly useful and well designed. We shall see.

When reflecting upon this project, I feel like it was fun and horrible at the same time. I got very carried away in the functionality of my tablet app, and became borderline obsessed with thinking through every aspect of my project as a functioning application and if it would work properly if it was instantly coded. One of the biggest challenges I faced was the size constraints we are dealing with. For me to create a whole application that encompasses nearly every aspect of what a restaurant server does on the the computer, combined with our entire menu, and then to present it in a way without feeling jumbled and crowded was pretty difficult. This is why I instantly had to decide that a smart phone was out of the picture, and that my project had to be tailored specifically for a tablet, simply because of the amount of information that needs to be presented.

Another issue that I thought a lot about was the overall appearance of this app. This is an application that is purely designed to be seen by servers at restaurants, and none of them care if the app is pretty looking or not. Simplicity and functionality are the two biggest factors in my mind. Can the server quickly navigate through this program and ring in different tables and different orders while impatient people are waiting. The server doesn’t need any pretty pictures or cool looks to this app, they just need it to be straight forward and fast. That being said, obviously I wasn’t about to make a bare-bones, wireframe looking application. Just because this app is exclusively for servers, doesnt mean that a customer won’t catch a glance of it, so I created a theme for this app that I feel sums up the overall theme/feel/genre of Outback Steakhouse (where I work), but this theme/color scheme could be swapped out depending on the restaurant. I didn’t deal too much with typography and choosing fonts, I just wanted to use fonts that read very quickly and are extremely simple for the server.

Overall, the hardest part of this project for me was designing the overall layout, and menu scheme. Because I have so much information to present, I had to start thinking about different menus and submenus, and I am actually pretty proud of the result. Again, the functionality of this was the most important part of designing this, and I am fairly confident that after a one-two minute tutorial, every person I work with could figure this out.

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.

This mobile app design has been my favorite project thus far in the class. Designing for the web is interesting, but it has nothing on designing a mobile app since there are so many more things to consider when designing for an app. One thing that I noticed that was crucial when designing for a mobile app is real estate and user interaction. I noticed these two things were crucial the hard way, and had trouble dealing with them at first. When I first started, I realized that I for the most part, over complicated things in the design, and how the user would interact with the app. Simple is definitely better and more convenient in this case. However, I saw significant improvement in how the user interacts with the app as the project progressed. One specific thing that I know progressed was the screen shot that had the short cuts where if you swipe your finger to the right, it would show the short cuts or if you swipe to the left, it would go to the next page which is a potential problem. Also the use of the back icon was a issue in the app because of the multiple pages in one section. However, by looking at the final product, you can see that these issues were resolved by simplifying. Instead having multiple ways you can scroll through pages, I reduced it down to one- the scroll bar.

I think the overall design for the app is APPealing, but I know that there is room for improvement. User interaction is the main thing that I noticed that I need to improve on. A successful design is great, but if the user doesn’t want to interact with it because of how the buttons work, then it won’t be a very successful app.

Designing for the smaller screen of the iPhone was both a challenge and a relief. It took less time and effort for my good ideas to come to fruition, but coming to those good ideas was a unique and sometimes confusing challenge. There was, however, something very familiar about designing an App, as if I was creating it to suit my own needs. I knew how I would navigate the interface, what I would expect from the functionality, and so on. You could argue that this experience should be the same for designing websites, but the mere fact that you navigate and control an App with your hands and fingers makes it much more interactive and intuitive, or at least demands that you make it so.

With all that said, it’s easy for my to forget certain conventions that all apps should keep. I wasn’t sure if I should use Apple’s back buttons, or select keys, or a whole slew of other icons that seem to appear on everything. Making my app, I strayed from using pre-made icons and buttons, hoping to give my app it’s own look, and not that of Apples. However now I wonder if that was just hurting my user’s experience, and fighting too much with convention. Looking over my app now, I see that even though I used my own buttons and my own back button, Apple’s design still managed to creep into my own, probably subconsciously. I guess this one is a fight that’s not worth fighting.

Another of my less abstract issues was that of contiguity between my pages. I had a ‘look’ that I wanted each page to adhere to, but I didn’t really have a ‘look’ that I wanted my entire app to adhere to. I think my final design makes sense because of app conventions (a map denotes a map page, a button is meant to be pushed, ect.) but apart from that falls a little short. This is seen clearly with the titles of my pages. When I was designing my app, I wasn’t thinking I wanted every page to be titled with a header. I figured the usage of that page would be clear enough to denote it’s meaning. However, once I put a header on one page (my ‘Find Around Me’ page) I realized that it was odd that the other pages didn’t follow that convention. There was a slight disconnect between my pages. This can be easily solved, I hope, my unifying my page layout, instead of varying it.

Apparently this was a very appealing assignment, that I would definitely appoint as one of my least appalling projects. Though at first I was apprehensive, I was able to approach it and ultimately find approval with my apparatus. Apple.

At the beginning of this project I didnt know how I felt about designing apps for mobile. But now after creating one in this class and learning more about it at DSVC, I feel way more confident and prepared to do this in the future. And Actually, I kind of enjoyed it!

Technically I might have left out a few pages that show how certain aspects of the app works, but as a whole I think I was on the right track. Me and photoshop are friends now so I am getting better at figuring out how to technically create what I want. Which is very beneficial. Conceptually is where I have the most problems. I like my three tasks that my app can handle, but wonder if it should be more simple or have more depth. The main area that I am talking about here is the font/lettering ID portion. It might be super helpful to people who dont know styles or genres of typography, but how many of the users of this app will be people who know nothing about typography? I’d be willing to guess few. So could my app do without guessing at the year, style, genre, or font of the picture taken? Maybe so, but anyway I think about it, I decided that it couldnt hurt to have it in there. Especially since there is the “other” box where people can put in a more detailed description if they know one. I am glad I made 15 pages though. If I didnt I think I would have been less secure in knowing people would understand my app.

I think I improved conceptually and interactively throughout the process of creating this app. I really wanted to make sure people understood the interface. The interface being styled after Instagram is an instant hit to whoever I show the app too. They understand it, appreciate it, and think its beautiful. I think thats a positive response right? My mom saw it on my website and said she even understood every part of it and wants to buy it! I also think in the other projects I didnt spend as much time thinking about interactivity as I did with this one. I believe interactivity and user experience is probably the most noticeable and hardest problems to deal with in mobile design. What I mean by that is when we see a problem with interactivity or the interface, we know its there, but the solution is so hard to find! I loved trying to solve these problems and keep the design cohesive at the same time.

In order to make more apps or do mobile design I have to do a lot more of it and really dive into UEX and UI design. Which I am excited about! Great project. Thanks

This project was a complete new level of interactive design. It was more challenging than just a webpage because you have to worry about the user interface and interactions in more detail. You only have a small screen and you have to use multiple screens to show the task, where on the web you have much more room. You also have to pay attention to tiny details, because this screen is so sharp and right in your face, any mistake will show. It has to be clean and simple, but complex in a way that makes your user feel at ease and comfortable.

I am not sure that I completely achieved this in my design. I think I improved on working through the wireframe process and the backbone for the app, but designing was challenging. I had ideas and wanted to convey them but it was difficult to get everything in there without feeling messy or uncomfortable. On the web there is a grid you can use to make it feel structured, but with this you have an empty rectangle and you have to make your own guidelines for spacing and putting in information randomly was challenging to make it fit in a structure. I think on my pages the main elements are done really well, like the header bar and the icon bar at the bottom, but figuring out a way to make the content work was difficult. I worked for a long time on them and I feel like they still dont feel quite right, or like I would not want to use this app until some things are re-organized or moved around. Sizing was completely different and somewhat of a challenge as well, changing over from the huge web screen to the tiny iphone screen. I think I want to re-work my first two pages because they feel too crammed, and then my last few pages dont feel believable, or real. I am not sure how to do that other than look at more apps to solve this problem.

Overall I am glad we did a mobile app because it helped me learn a new way of designing and it will be a good thing to say that I can do. I think that, like our first webpage, our first app will not be quite perfect because we are trying to learn something new, but considering it worked out pretty well.

The biggest technical mistake I had to deal with was sizing and appropriate look and feel for an iphone app. I waited until almost the last minute to put the psd in on my phone to see how it would look and it slowed down a lot of things. Also, a lot of work I had created ended up being deleted due to sizing so it was really a time bomb. I felt like I was never able to see exactly how it would look on phone as it did on the computer so I had to keep stopping to upload a pic on my phone to double check. There a lot of small details I found at the end that needed to be corrected and fixed – like back buttons and menu options. The biggest difference between the app and website are those small details- on your comp. you have a constant browser allowing you to step back or jump forward or refresh and with the app you must create all of those features. I just need to try and remember to export earlier on in the process and have someone besides myself run through my task list with the app and see if they can get to all those pages and tasks smoothly and efficiently and with no frustration.
One improvement although not a requirement of this specific project was that I actually completed all 35 sketches. Even though it was not part of the assignment it helped quite a bit. It was definitely easier to get started and reminded me of all the details I wanted to put into the app. It also helped me cut out a lot of unnecessary items.
Throughout the process I was able to see improvements with sizing of texts and pictures and buttons- I am starting to grasp the idea of hiearchy. I think it  is a little different when creating an app as one can always zoom in on their phone but still- hopefully there will be no need too. I am trying to pay more attention to negative space- awkward spaces and trying to make them look intended and clean.
I still need to work on keeping up with all due dates as it will help the overall project go way smoother and not create as many late nights (hopefully).