App Design

This project took a lot of planning and organisation as there was a lot to cover within the set timeframe. I began with collating app ideas on Miro, creating boards exploring the directions I could take it. Following this, I carried out a large amount of research into the area of travel apps. One of my key influences for the direction I took was our lecturer saying it didn’t have to be a “real” app and that we could push it to the limits. Due to this, I settled on a space theme. Following finding a theme to base the app around I began researching competitors and existing travel apps on the market.

Sketching and Research

I began sketching and iterations through ideas, some of which would get changed later on in the process. I tend to find my initial sketches too messy to convey what I mean to other people so I always go back and refine them further. I recently saw a way of displaying phone mockup sketches that would give you a better idea of the scale of buttons and the positioning before taking it to a digital medium. These helped in working out the placement of buttons and that anything regularly used was in reach.

I looked at a lot of other app designs and the placement of their buttons and content and used these to inform my designs and itterations. Not only did I take notice to the placement of content but also the styling of text and images. The use of rounded edges and recurring colours.

Designing a set of icons was part of the task set. I thought it would be appropriate to design a set of planet icons. These went through iterations of colour and line thickness. To begin with I had them fully coloured with shading however I felt like this subtracted from the rest of the design and made them less of and icon and more of an illustration.

After going through multiple iterations and digital sketches I came to a final set of screens that I liked. I took these into photoshop and places them into some high-resolution mockups and displayed them on a background. Overall I was happy with my outcome and was pleased with the relationship in size between the app design and the phone.

Overall I was pleased with the outcome of the task and feel as if I have addressed the criteria appropriately. I enjoyed the sketching and idea development stages of this project. I was pleased with how my icons came out and found that they fitted well within the app, however, I didn’t create different sized vectors so I had to redesign them later to be scaled up which cause a backup in my workflow.
‍
With respect to the digital iterations, I needed to take more progression photos and screenshots to show my progression and iterations. Unfortunately, all I have now is the mess that those failed versions left behind and any sketching that lead up to them. In regards to the design, I am very pleased. I would have liked to spend more time on the illustrations however I had fairly limited time.
‍
If I were to do it again I would show more screens with user interactions and how these would be carried out. I think that the lack of popups and motion within my mockups lets them down. I would also create a Gantt chart to help manage my time, especially with a large project like this that can easily be broken down into multiple smaller tasks.