Ashleigh Tan - Mobile App Design

Overall this has been a really good experience and to be honest a once in a life time opportunity. The absolute curve ball called COVID-19 put us in an emergency situation and we learnt to adapt and move through it, despite it being a challenge at times.

Our presentation went well and we left feeling satisfied despite the quite minor details our lecturer gave to us. Our peers also seemed to enjoy it and it was a satisfying feeling knowing we managed to achieve something that looked pretty well rounded.

Despite how ridiculous all the art boards ending up looking on our XD document we managed to make sure we had all the info we needed while keeping it clean and consistent aesthetic wise. We were able to sort out how we wanted to present the alert system that you could access throughout using the application which was a big sigh of relief. Things rounded off well despite the occasional bump in the prototyping flow again. 

This was definitely a hard week as things felt like they were all over the place. Lots of stuff needed to get done in a relatively short amount of time and it got overwhelming pretty quick. This felt like a small drawback but eventually we kept going. Our alert systems were starting to work well for the emergency aspect which led towards things falling into place. 

From here on we were able to get some crucial feedback on where our app should be heading from there onwards. We decided to refine some pages and add extra elements to existing pages that were almost strong.

I was deathly sick for week 4 and the looming threat of COVID-19 entering our country was terrifying so unfortunately I was unable to leave my bed therefore unfortunately missing out on classes this week. 

Today’s lesson was very productive and involved a lot of making and fleshing out our ideas even more. We decided to jump into Adobe XD to try digitalising one of our paper prototypes to get a rough idea of how our application would work with regards to navigation and connectivity between screens. We also received some more crucial feedback from our lecturer with regards to how our design process can be furthered with regards to what happens after the alert to coast guard has been sent out.

Today’s lesson started off with more prototyping before going through some rounds of user testing with our class mates and a lecture discussing Adobe XD and student examples. These first few experiences with user testing really put us through the rounds and we were able to get other peoples opinions on what worked and what didn’t. We gathered some crucial feedback that will help us to improve our next rounds of paper prototyping.

We started off todays lesson with crucial feedback from our lecturer; to scrap our idea of specifically focusing on motor failure. We realised that boat owners that are stranded would rather just find a way home as soon as possible. Where are they? What/who is near them? What kind of weather features would help them get to land safely? The paper prototyping was essential in mapping out what was needed on screen and what wasn’t.

Our original idea of doing insect bites and stings fell short as we realised we’d get bored of it by the time it hit week 3. Through this we decided to opt for sea related emergencies and started the paper prototyping process.

This first lesson was a brief introduction into what the course entailed and what we’d be getting ourselves into for the next 6 weeks. We did an interesting exercise where we traveled to a certain location and explored the environment. We were then given an emergency situation and had to see how the experience of the environment changed. It was interesting to visualise how different a certain area might look like in the event of an emergency and really got us thinking about what were the key elements that you would need to know if you were trapped.