Day 3: Sketching Interfaces
Yesterday we had the opportunity to learn and practice asking the user the right questions, keeping an open mind, listening to what they have to say, empathize, and most importantly not assuming that we know what the user wants. As you may know by now, my project is to design an experience for a weather app. I interviewed a total of 9 people, 6 from General Assembly and 3 from the outside world. Although I spoke to people from various demographics, technical abilities, behaviors and cultural backgrounds, I noticed they all shared similar reasons for checking the weather.
They need to know what to wear according to the weather conditions
They need to know how to prepare for the next day
They check for weather updates at least twice a day
They check the weather before leaving home or before going to bed
They want information that is not cluttered and it’s easy to access
They want information to load in real time and it’s as accurate as possible
Based on the feedback that I gathered, I came up with different features to solve the user’s pressing problems. The following is a list of solutions; some of them might interest you, while others may be too ambitious or impractical. The main objective of this exercise is to get as many ideas out, so that I can later choose the best ones.
Users will get a vertical timeline view of the weather when the app loads
Users will be able to alerts on what to wear
Users will be able to share weather information with friends
Users will be able to find stores that sell umbrellas
Users will be able to have an umbrella delivered to them
Users will be able to find routes to not get soaked during a rain storm
Users will be able to carpool with other members from the weather app community
Users will be able to find buildings where they can wait till the rain passes by
Users will be able to buy umbrellas at this location if they don't want to wait
Users will be able to integrate their Uber or Lyft accounts to hail a cab during inclement weather
Users will be able to order rain boots or weather related apparel
Users will be able to get updated information even if they are offline, the app will refresh itself in the background
Users will be able to add how the weather feels based on their own experience
Users will be able to alert their friends
Make mistakes, learn to fail, fight resistance.
Today we practiced the ancient art of creating storyboards and rapid sketching. We cleared our tables, set them up like a design workshop, tucked our shiny MacBooks away and pulled out our sketchbooks. We started off by doodling abstract squiggly lines on the blank sheet of paper with a Sharpie. The whole purpose of this was to get you out of the fear of having to sketch something perfect and let the creative juices start flowing. Nevan gave us 2 minutes to come up with a storyboard about the user interacting with one of the features we created for our apps. This exercise was fun because we got to visualize a scenario on a storyboard demonstrating how the user would interact and be impacted by the feature you created. The next phase was to begin sketching the interface of your app on paper. Like the first exercise, we were also given 2 minutes to come up with at least 5 screens of your prototype. The beauty about sketching on paper is that if you make a mistake or you need to make a change, you can create another screen and draw the changes you’d like to make.
jacobvanloon
gummygunk
titsay
izzy806
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
