FemFly- Women empowering women, an app service.
Introduction
The increasingly intriguing paradigm shift relating to gender stems from a number of questions. These questions relate to the how & why of things, and the answers to the questions typically tie to the progressive history we have uniquely been a part of. While the expansive nature of gender has recently revealed itself, the progressive nature of women has been expressed for some time now. Given history is deeply rooted in the understanding of women, my desire lies in witnessing women helping other women. This is the reason why I developed FemFly! A Networking Phone Application designed to assist women to reach out to all sorts of successful women to share stories, meet for guidance, and continue doing what women do best, help others. Let your wings stretch, girl! Join FemFly today!
Design Process
While studying UX design, we were taught these important steps when creating any functional app:
01 Research
02 Sketch & Wireframe
03 Moodboard & Resources
04 Design
Research & Wireframes
I began by creating personae relating to people I thought would have issues like this and would use/need an application that would solve said issues.
Next, I collected data based on the work/life balance of my female friends and family members. I asked discovery questions that would lead to them providing an insightful story with enough information to prove my hypothesis true or false. After discovering their needs, I decided to create an app that would facilitate their means of communication with other motivational women and help inspire one another to better their lives.
Then, I created a low fidelity flowchart and wireframes to show the placement of logos, buttons, and navigations. This helped with organizing user flow and guide me when creating the UI design on inVision Studio.
Design Flaws:
Fill in boxes look too closely similar as call to action buttons
Font color clashes with text on buttons
Too many clickable options
Too many unnecessary emails in the inbox
Changes to be implemented:
Change button colors
Change font color to black/dark gray
Reduce the number of clickable options
Reduce inbox messages to only 2 emails
Moodboard & Design
Doing some research on design look and color theory helped solidify the color palates and overall UI design.
Pinterest has a wide range of strong design inspiration for designers of any kind. This is also true for UI design. It has the latest trends and styles that are working in the industry and is where I found a lot of the inspiration for my mood board. Definitely recommend for anyone needing an extra boost of inspiration to go use Pinterest's search engine.
When I was studying Graphic Design for my undergrad, I learned some valuable information: “Less is more”. Because of this, I wanted to keep my UI simple and to the point. I learned color theory which is very important in marketing and branding. I chose the color purple for my overall design because it symbolizes femininity and power. These are the core concepts I wanted to embody with my app. I wanted to show the women of the world that we are an unstoppable force with unlimited potential.
Typography also played a large role in my college career. I fell in love with the font “Century Gothic”. The simplicity and cleanliness of this typeface fit almost any design. When combined well, it makes a statement of professionalism which is another quality I wanted to portray with FemFly.
Home Screen
As previously mentioned, less is more. I wanted to keep the design simple, with the least amount of buttons and navigations as possible. In the home screen, we have a simple login screen with the FemFly logo and your credential information with a “GO” so sign in or an alternate “SIGN UP” for new users.
Sign up & Preferences
After you hit “SIGN UP”, you will navigate to a signup form in which you will specify a few small details about yourself for a small profile section to be viewed by the mentors. This will let them know who you are and what your interests are so they can have better insight into possible ideas you may be interested in for your future career.
After you complete the signup form, the mentor preferences page will come next. This is the page where you will select settings in which the app algorithm will help determine which are the best mentors for you. There are options from degree type, minor, years of experience, audience, and other certifications that a mentor may have in conjunction with their degree.
Feed and List Toggle Screen
After this has filtered through the mentor users, you will find yourself in the newsfeed. Here is where the mentor’s statuses will be showcased so you can get a better feel of who is who and see if you would like to engage with any mentors via their favorite quotes or vacation spots. There is a toggle menu at the top of the screen which will allow the user to choose if they want to view the feed or simply view a list of their filtered mentors.
This list shows the mentor's name, degree, and years of experience. From each of these toggle screens, the user will be able to select a mentor profile they would like to view in more detail and click on it to explore.
Profiles & Messaging
Once the mentor profile has been opened, the user can view their details such as age, gender, education, work, and most recent status. Here the users will find an option to “SEND MESSAGE” to the mentor and request insight via message or request a phone call or skype/zoom call.
The user can view all their messages with all the mentors that they have reached out through, via this inbox.
Backward Navigation
Every page has a back button. This button will take you to the last page you came from making it simple and quick to navigate through the application.
Review
Finally, this is a concept app that is live on inVision. It requires further testing but I would love to see how many women would actually be interested in using these services. Another thing I would love to have added given more time would be a zoom/skype like a portal where women could directly handle their meetings via voice/face interactions leading from the messaging system straight through to a conference call of sorts. Please feel free to give insight if this sounds like a good idea or any other product flaws/issues are apparent.\
Live Project
If you would like to preview the live app, please click the following link: