WOW, I can’t believe we made it through the semester! I’ve learned so much and am much more confident in myself. I can’t wait to start my grad program in September.
P.S. I might keep this blog to also document my experience through my 11-month grad program.
We added color and changed out app’s interactions around some. We worked hard to get the app to the condition it is, applying our classmates’ suggestions. After two 8hr working days, we’ve decided we are ready to send our app out on social media!
We noticed a lot of limitations and technical issues with the Maze website. I don’t think I would use this website again in the future. We tried to seek out other free user testing websites, however, despite their cool features, their interface and the way they presented the user test was not up to our standards or did not present our app in the way we preferred. Elvira and I shared our Maze results with the class.
We then turned in most of our assignment but are waiting to submit the wireframe/prototype as we are waiting to see if we need to turn our presentation of the wireframe into one for the entire project.
here is the link our tablet app River
This week we are working on our user testing and getting our app in tip-top condition. We quickly got two versions of a test for our app for our classmates to evaluate. So far, we’ve had a mix of reviews some 3s, 4s, and 5s for ratings for our app. The Maze website had a lot of limitations with the free version.
We have started working on some of the critiques the reviewers left for us. We plan to finish our app and redo our Maze test and send it out by tomorrow which is Thursday. We will update next week with our results from over the weekend.
edit: link to our wireframes
We have a roadmap of what the final weeks of this semester will look like: developing our app. After voting as a class it was decided that we will push our twice-a-week meetings down to one! We were given instructions to work on what screens we will develop for our app to aid us in our wireframes/prototypes.
Over the weekend Elvira thought of a cool name for our app: River: A Connection Through Streams. Since our app is based on streams (movies, live-streams, etc.) we thought it would be cool to have a slogan that incorporates how streams work in real life and online. “Just as rivers are important or the earth, our app is important for human connections”, “Rapids” a term to describe fast connection on the app, our homepage might be called “watershed” We are thinking earth tones for our app’s color scheme.
We will start to work on screens and the UI on Wednesday!
On Wednesday Elvira and I outdid ourselves. We originally planned to map out what screens we would need for our wireframes. However, after trying to plan this out on Miro, we decided to just move to Figma. Well, 8 hrs. we have the bases for all our screens as well as our almost completed wireframes. The Figma document looks ridiculous with all of our screens and the strings of interactions from screen to screen that resemble spaghetti.
The next thing up for us is to finish working on our Wireframes this weekend as we discovered towards the end that Figma does not allow us to switch the orientation from Portrait to Landscape within one document. After a bit of frustration, we spent a few mins brainstorming and decided to change the orientation to Landscape so it will better fit the finishing point of our frames.
We also plan to add final touches to all our interactions to make sure each button leads to a specific page but to also make sure the interaction makes sense.
After all of this, we will start picking color schemes and UI for our app and convert our Wireframes to a finalized prototype that will be sent for people to evaluate.
After waiting for a couple of days we decided to choose a topic for our app since we did not receive a lot of responses to our survey. We decided to go with Netflix for social networking app. This app essentially will provide those who enjoy watching movies with others but either live too far from friends or family, are social isolating/distancing, are in long-distance relationships, and more.
Elvira and I completed our competitor analysis and gathered all the information we need to start the development of our tablet app. We showed Mr. Bennett the work we had so far and he mentioned a few changes. We fixed those changes and were able to move on to the next part of our project: personas. We decided to develop two personas to fit what an average user for our app would be.
After working on our personas we started the user flow for our app. We were given instructions to have at least 7 tasks flows. Giving a birds eye view of our app.
Over the weekend Elvira and I worked together to originally think of possibly 5 app ideas. However, after an hour of thinking, we managed to create a list of 9 potential app ideas. We both created our top 5 from the list but also created a survey for our classmates to vote on to help us decide.
We are still awaiting the full results from our classmates that will help us narrow down to one app idea. We were instated to watch the film Design Disruptors for a bit of insight into how the user experience design world works. I found the film to be very inspiring and got me excited for what’s to come. I accepted the offer of admittance into UW’s MHCI+D program today and am hopeful to be in their position one day!
This weekend Elvira and I will work on our competitor analysis for our chosen product as well as creating a persona for our app.
Alexis Nicholson 