Week 8— Getting the flow down
We started the week off with our first sprint to write and assign priorities to the features to be coded by Debbie, our development intern.
Now that we know the features to be built, it’s time to think about the actual user experience- how should the user navigate through the app, and what should that look like?
Mid-week, we had a design review with the designers here at MxM- Adam, Christine, and James. After showing what I’d been up to since our last round of prototyping, I realized the importance of making a site map to facilitate thinking how we’d want to design the navigation and interactions. We also discussed how the core experience of journaling should feel. Would users prefer to split up the guided journal entry questions into separate cards, or journal from a the static one page template form? Should we ask the user each time whether they preferred a guided and free hand entry, or default them to one?
Finally, I sat down with Christine to use index cards to really map out how we envisioned the flow to be, starting from high level features, down to the screens that each feature should have. We decided on moving from the classic bottom navigation tabs to a more fluid, minimalistic interface with a landing page of mood analysis with a focus on the add journal entry button because we wanted to focus on this as the main interaction of the app.
With a more clear understanding of the overall flow, it will be easier (and very much a prereq) to step up the fidelity for the UI moving forward and thinking about branding.
On a side note, I attended a musical improv class last night at the Magnet Theater. Initial reaction stumbling into class— wow, you want me to what?
Free-styling verses about cacti, pancakes, and Russia doesn’t quite come so naturally. I definitely hadn’t felt so out of my comfort zone in a while. I’ve always wanted to try improv to get me out of my comfort zone and do appreciate that many designers use it as a way to get them out of their own and be more open minded in their craft. But, I must say for now that I have a better time appreciating than producing in this arena :)
