amz design

gk3 - interactive products

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ahoworks_01

at the beginning of the aho works week i fell sick with the noro-virus, so instead of showcasing my work throughout the semester i was at home being sick. this was extremely frustrating to me, as i really wanted to showcase the work.

aho works is an incredible way to both experience the other students’ work throughout the semester as well as to showcase what you’ve been working on.

[amz-design]

thewebandthecity_19

this was perhaps the most educational of all the projects thus far, because you realized that an app is really not the answer to a lot of problems. working more towards a mobile platform, such as a well developed website could in many cases be more than enough.

for our project spesifically i think our group was an odd mix of people who wanted different things, and had trouble communicating that to eachother. even if we weren’t aware of it at the time i think there was a lot more compromise from each person to make something everyone was somewhat happy with, rather than communicate and end up making something everyone was satisfied with.

looking back, and reflecting upon the response we recieved at the presentation, i definitely see a lack of honest communication - at least from my part. we focused too little on research during the beginning, and i think that halted us quite a bit. as well as working with bicycles when the winter ended up coming to oslo was perhaps not the brightest idea for a first-time app making process, however in that i think there was also a lot of learning in regards to the research fase.

[amz-design]

thewebandthecity_18

the final project!

our film showing the app.

as well as the website!

http://rfadarkdale.netlify.com

[amz-design]

thewebandthecity_17

the day before the presentation. today we’ve worked on the finishing touches. making sure the protoypes work on the website, finishing up the website as well as doing the final edits on the film.

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thewebandthecity_16

i realized i’d forgotten to post our flowchart, that martin made. so here it is.

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thewebandthecity_15

as i was tasked with creating the website, jon anders, martin and oskar went out to film and edit.

[amz-design]

thewebandthecity_14

seeing as we have to make a film presenting the app i was tasked with creating a storyboard. i wasn’t sure what the others thought about how to create the film, so i created two different ones.

it turned out that everyone in the group agreed and wanted the second one.

[amz-design]

thewebandthecity_13

we realized that we had forgotten about our personas, so we created a new one - trying to rework our prototype to fit her.

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thewebandthecity_12

jon anders took a lot of photographs of the “app in action” that we could use on the website - here are some of them.

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thewebandthecity_11

oskar and i have been making icons for the app, dividing the work between us as we needed quite a few.

here are some of them!

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thewebandthecity_10

after working more on research, and how we want the final app to be we’ve divided some tasks to make more prototypes.

[amz-design]

thewebandthecity_09

our two first personas based on the people we’ve talked to.

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thewebandthecity_08

sketches for lock-screen ideas

we have this idea of an app that will use components already in your phone to track when you cycle, and give you an update on your lockscreen, rather than send out notifications several times per day. one of the reasons we came to the conclusion that this might be interesting was that when ingvild from the municipality came to talk to us, she talked about how much notifications and text-messages end up irking the users rather than entice them. we saw this in our research as well, people said they were more likely to stop using and app, or even delete it, if it ended up bothering them. however we also realized that without any communication people could forget the app in stressful periods and end up not using it.

i’m probably not the only person who has several apps on my phone that i’ve just quit using because i forget i have them.

[amz-design]

thewebandthecity_07

continuing with research, and after talking with some of the TAs, we’ve decided to go for the co2 idea rather than the bike-fixing one. however as we’re almost half way in the project we have a lot of work ahead.

[amz-design]

thewebandthecity_06

based on the research we did it does seem as if our current project might not be the way to go - but we’re doing more research before tomorrow to look into if the co2-idea is a more plausible one.

we did research by asking people on the streets about bicycles, and it seems as if most people we talked to don’t want an app informing you of the places where you can fix it, but that was just from one day of research, so it’s difficult to actually find out if it’s correct or not. by tomorrow we’re going to talk to a few more people, and try to get some more nuanced responses. if not - the people we talked to were very interested in the environment, so we thought we’d research a bit more regarding the co2 app.

not necessarily having it as an app to be used every day actively, but rather to have it run in the background and collect data - much in the same way as a fitbit would, but based on a phone and the gps.

we’re also working on creating personas based on the people we’ve researched.

[amz-design]

thewebandthecity_05

now we’re doing research regarding if our angle regarding this project is plausible - and preparing questions to find out if our assumptions are correct or not. 

jon-anders and myself will go out and ask random people, whilst oskar is going around at school asking people.

martin will stay back working mainly on online research - sending out emails to different bicycle shops and people in the municipality who are in charge of oslo and bicycles.

[amz-design]

thewebandthecity_04

after presenting our three concepts we recieved good feedback, making us contemplate which concept was most realistic for users to actually use.

discussing a bit around this we decided to go with the sos/hjelp-idea, because we think it has the most potential of being actually used.