We are Colourful Minds and during our sessions of our Ad ’n’ Pr Lab, “Digital Creativity; Apps, Games, Coding”, in order to learn how to create our own applications and websites, we had the chance to meet and receive insights from experts in the field of Application Development and User Experience. More specifically, we hosted the UX Prodigy (https://www.theuxprodigy.com/), one of the most successful companies in their domain, who showed us the Heuristics Evaluation, a very useful tool to evaluate a website or an application, when it comes to user experience. For a better comprehension of this matter, they invited us to choose an application or website, evaluate it using the Heuristics and present it to our colleagues. Our choice was the Dropbox website. This practical evaluation helped us change the way we see/understand a website and whether it is user-experience friendly or not.
In addition, we had the opportunity to meet Magy Kontou, Co-Founder, Lead UI/UX Designer at SimpleApps, who showed us how to create our own application and how to design it using the Proto.Io program.
As far as our own projects are concerned, we were assigned to ideate and create a website and an application for our idea. After hours of brainstorming, we finally thought of an idea. We wanted to work with a socially-oriented idea, something that would help our co-citizens. So we agreed on creating a site and app about blood donations and plea in Greece. We found out that there were not any sites or applications about this subject and the ones that existed were on a very basic level. Before we started working, we had to conduct a research to find out what Greeks think about blood donation, whether they are active donors or not and if not and other questions regarding this matter. We asked more than 50 people aged 18–55 to complete an online questionnaire. The results we gathered showed that most of them are not blood donors but they would like to become at some point. We got a very interesting piece of insight, that we took into consideration while building our site and app.
So, we began creating!
The part we started with was the application, mainly because nowadays it is much easier to use applications than visit websites on your computer. In the beginning, we faced some difficulties because we weren’t familiar with such programs as Proto.Io , but we quickly got used to it and serious progress was made.
To use our service, users have to create a profile by filling in their personal information and their blood type. They have the ability to plea if blood is needed, to find out where they can donate if needed, the emergency hospitals in their area, reminders for their previous donations and to write down their medical history. In the app version you can also choose your favorite profiles in order to get notified if there is a lack of blood. Both the site and the app provide notifications, in order for the user to know when he can donate blood again and whatever is necessary. There is also a help button, a privacy policy section and the choice of both our services in Greek or English.
After developing the application, we started working on the website, using the app as a guideline. We used the same colors and icons, the same flow and we tried to make it as similar as possible, even though some elements could not be transferred to the PC version.
The result was very pleasing and we believe that we combined effectively the insights of the UX Prodigy and Magy Kontou.
Betty Tsakarestou Dr. Stavros Kaperonis Lambrini Tsiligianni Nefeli Staikoura Maria Staikopoulou Eleni Georgiou Amalia St Andromache Efstathiou