Week 5 — Final Prototype & Thoughts
— Written by… well, everyone on the team! (but mainly Geet Samra) —
We’re back with our final update on our app project! Read on about the final steps we took as a team to bring our app to life.
Design Revision Process
After receiving feedback about our previous low-fi prototype, we made significant improvements to the overall design, and our final design has actual graphics instead of placeholders. (Also, no more awkward menu screens for each and every screen; it’s just an overlay now!)
The process of creating another prototype based off the designs from our low-fi prototype was rather straightforward. We addressed most of the problems that test users reported in the rougher low-fi prototype from earlier, and frankly, we simply translated the drafts full of placeholders into a fully flushed-out interface.
We assigned specific frames to each member on the team, and carried out our hi-fi prototyping through Figma, an online tool made specially for interface design. We then came back together to review our design layouts, making adjustments wherever was needed in order to produce a more clean and consistent prototype. This included changes to color scheme, icons, buttons, font, and text. We made sure that the colors remained true to our color scheme, that the back buttons (as well as other icons) were positioned consistently in the right place, and that the general format fit what we envisioned. Once we completed the layout of our hi-fi prototype, we pieced and linked everything together through InVision. Now, we have a clickable and interactive prototype to use for our demo!
Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for… [drum roll]
Our hi-fi prototype!
And here’s a description of our app if we put it in an app store:
Solid is an app designed specifically for college students that want to work small to big jobs for reasonable pay. Our app allows users to post and find jobs, communicate and negotiate between client and employer, and send secure payments to one another. Our goal is to help college students — undergraduate and graduate students — to find jobs on their free time to support themselves financially in the short-term.
Team Reflections
Our team came together and reflected on the times we spent working on our app. I (Geet) was the last to join this class, so I was placed on Team Do Me a Solid and honestly had no idea what to expect. However, my team came through for me and caught me up with the initial thoughts and ideas, and from there came up with the idea of Solid. Within the last five weeks, we not only grew as a team, but as individuals, learning how to collaborate to make the our app as user friendly as possible, working through disagreements to come to a consensus.
We all agree that coming up with a direction for the app was the hardest thing we had to do. It was a matter of compromise, in that everyone gave up a little of their ideal app in order to generate one from a united effort that would top our individual ideas. Akshat had this idea of incorporating a Voice UI, and we toyed with the idea for a very long time before coming to the consensus that it would potentially become an update for the app sometime in the future. Looking back, Akshat says “The most notable discussion I’ve had was debating with my team about the merits of a voice-driven UI for our app versus the standard UI you see in most apps. This three-week discussion across peers, TAs, and Professor Boyle further piqued my interest in design thinking . I hope to carry these lessons, perspectives, experiences, and ideas with me into my future ventures.” But once we chose the direction, we had a really fun time letting our creativity flow in the design aspect.
For all of us, the design process was a very rewarding experience. Of her experience, Jennifer says “I discovered that design isn’t just all about making things look aesthetically pleasing and pretty. In fact, design has way more to it than that, with the core of design really coming down to how you improve the experience of your users and how well you can tailor it to them.” For Sarmed, he reflects, “this past month has been a solid learning experience for me. Between needfinding and storyboarding, to a full blown prototype, I have experienced a whole new side to designing that I never knew before.” We can all agree. The design of the user interface is a lot more complicated than we had initially thought, making this a very good learning experience for all of us.
We all have something we can take away from this class. Five strangers came together to design an app and define a user experience from beginning to end. Insane. Five weeks later I’ve come to see them all as friends. To put it in other terms, Nathan says “Not only is [this course] much shorter than a normal course, the amount of work required is surprisingly heavy for a team of five or six people.” The weekly assignments played a huge role in our understanding of what it takes to be designer and how to target the app for a user friendly experience. I was initially worried that the constant decision making and compromise would lead to a standstill amongst the team members, but all it accomplished was breaking the dam to our creativity, letting if flow even more freely as we worked to invent new ways around the problems that we continued to face in our design. We are all really proud of the app we produced and it’s meant to help the members of the UCSD community.
Overall, I have to say that I really enjoyed over the past month, and my teammates definitely agree. We had a solid (see what I did there?) time over this past month working together to put forward an app we are all really proud of. I am a proud member of Team Do Me a Solid and I honestly could not have asked for a better team for this project!
Team Do Me A Solid, signing off!
We hope to continue improving the design of this app and actually coding it someday, but for now, it’s just a dream we’ve written down in our diaries!
