We were asked to create an app that helped fix a small problem in our everyday lives. I found myself to sometimes have a hard time focusing on my tasks and that is where my idea came from.
“Introducing FocusUp: an app that you can get on any smart phone or tablet to help students focus on their important tasks and tracks the time they study by using their location. It’s super easy to use! Simple download the app, then login using your school username and password, click on an assignment you want to work on, set a time, lock your phone and get studying! Then more time you spend studying the more point you earn. Rack up lots of point and you can earn prizes from the school store!”
How I did it:
This was a pretty big project. I started off with interviewing some of my classmates to help me understand my problem a little better than what I personally know already. After gaining my research I then started a proposal. In the proposal we figure out a problem statement and strategic plan. The problem statement is just a question about what we are trying to fix (“How can people focus better on tasks and prevent distractions from our phones”). The strategic plan just goes over what will be on the app and how you will let others know about the app. Then I did a heuristic evaluation which is a process where we measure the usability of “user interfaces in independent walkthroughs and report issues”. I used 10 different measurements. I created a competitive analysis after that which is just used as a criteria to look at the usability of the competitors. This helps identify competitors, and understand competitor’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to my app. It helps “gauge how to curb competitors and refine my own strategy”. I then complete an analysis where I go over personas (demographics, needs/expectations and how to adapt to those needs/expectations), scenarios (goals and questions to be achieved and how the user(s) can achieve them), and lastly use cases (building the structure and organize information for your designs for those scenarios). After all that research, I finally started creating wireframes for my app. I drew out ideas for navigation, buttons, message-popups, and every page/screen the user would see. When all my ideas were finally draw out, I started actually designing them in Illustrator. I ended up with designing 45 screens. I showcased 5 of the 45 in the image above. You can see the process by clicking the link below:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19KubIzBdKWyeOXWbrscLvn_zJcyXSsmO/view?usp=sharing
