Thesis Journal of Leroy Tellez

I am an SVA 2015 MFA IxD Candidate. View my portfolio here.

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A prototype of one of the my app’s features.

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I decided to redesign the app, and create a more interesting and fun user experience. The previous version, although efficient, felt like it could be pushed further visually. I’m also exploring a feature that will suggest events for you and friends that you haven’t seen in a while.

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I’ve been very interested in contextual awareness for quite sometime now. In early 2014 I, along with two classmates, created a feature (conceptual project) for Apple’s iOS which focussed around contextually aware text messaging, and the lock screen. The project can be seen here.

What was especially nice about this project was that a few months later, Apple announced very similar features at the WWDC.

I’ve always felt strongly that technology can do a better job at mitigating many of our daily interactions and routines than it currently does. We have very personal relationships with these devices. They know our habits, our behaviors, our likes and our dislikes. If you think about it, our phones’ know us better than we know ourselves. 

However, our devices fail at recognizing our routines and patterns which they are more than capable of understanding. For instance, when I leave my apartment, the first I thing I do is plug in my earbuds and listen to either a playlist or a podcast, although easy said than done is and under statement.

I grab my phone, open the door, plug in my headphones, and with my free hand lock the door. I then put my keys away, and proceed to walk down four flights of stairs while attempting to unlock my phone, exit the app I was previously in, find Spotify, wait for that too load, find a playlist, open that playlist, and finally hit play.

Why can’t the Spotify icon appear on the bottom left hand corner of the screen when my phone recognizes that I have plugged in my earbuds?

These are the types of design interventions that I find ground breaking. They are subtle and hardly noticeable, but they are impactful.

But wait...

I recently noticed while walking to my gym that Apple has finally caught on. The screen grab above demonstrates how my phone recognized that my location was near my gym, and it offered up quick access to my gym’s app. It’s not only extremely useful, but finally technology is beginning to catch up, and provide useful, albeit small interventions to my life.

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I took a break from prototyping the app experience (I’m horrible at coding), and I decided to redesign the Wevite logo. I wanted to create something that utilized negative space, and I feel upon this design that plays off of the w and v shapes.

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After various design concepts and structures, I’ve arrived at a look and feel that I am liking. My goal is to create an app that balances utility and complexity delivered in an easy to use experience. It should be inviting, but not time consuming. The purpose is to foster short interactions at a high rate of frequency. In and out, which is why I opted for a very clean interface and simple interactions. 

I originally began with the idea of whimsical and fun touch points to deliver the scheduling experience, but the feedback I received was that it was time consuming and unnecessary.

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I’ve created two personas that reflect my target users. Based on the various interviews and conversations with various people, there seems to be one of two categories that people tend to fall under. 

The Planner This is the person who is always leading the charge and initiating get togethers. Although busy with their career, their free time is best spent with close friends. They value these close relationships, and they keep a healthy social life to balance the stresses of their work day. Always active, The Planner has specific groups of friends that correspond with their interests and likes.

Depending on which group they’d like to make plans with, The Planner uses different tools to coordinate with different friends. Email or text for their inner circle, and Doodle for the Book Club group. Unfortunately, not everyone is as attentive and as engaged as they are, so they’re biggest issues are emails and text messages going unread because of their friends busy lives.

The Passive Attendee Busy with work, relationship, and side projects, The Passive Attendee loves their friends, but finds it hard to balance the challenges of life with his tight schedule. Although always missing the company of his inner circle, The Passive Attendee doesn’t have the time to plan a night out. They much prefer to have the date, time, and location decided for them. Tell them when and where, they will be there as long as it fits into their busy lives.

With little time to actually plan or even keep an up to date social calendar, The Passive Attendee finds it annoying to have to constantly enter the same information into their phone’s calendar app. So they opt for doing their best to remember any plans they have committed to.

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Planning between you and your friends is a chore, and Wevite wants to make it effortless and efficient by learning your patterns and behaviors.

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The invite creation process. In order for the app to be used optimally, it would need to be downloaded by all participants, and for those participants to allow the app to have calendar access.

If one of your friends does not have the app, a basic invite will be sent to them via SMS containing basic invite information: date, time, and location. The SMS message will have the ability to push to your calendar along with a link to download the Wevite app.

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This is a screen grab of an email conversation between my friends and I. Our planning tool of choice is email and sometimes text messaging. We find that these two options are more convenient than Doodle and Facebook Events. Although we find convenience in emails, it is still very much inefficient and time consuming. This long running chain went on for a few days, and ultimately ended up with an indecisive amount of back and fourth, and us not being able to find a convenient time to meet up.

I strongly feel that the amount of time and energy it takes to participate in a planning conversation over email is extremely tiresome. Our time is already limited consumed by work, and by life in general. There is definitely a need for a streamlined system that understands my behaviors and patterns to create an efficient and easy to use experience.

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A big inspiration for my idea is the life stage I’m currently in. I’m in my mid 30s (34 to be exact). Moreover, with this life stage comes so many new responsibilities and changes. The biggest of them being more serious romantic relationships, marriage, buying a house, and kids. Sprinkled on top of all of this is career. 

As my circle of friends gets smaller and smaller, the appreciation and value I hold for those friendships grows and grows. 

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Here is the third prototype for my thesis project. However, since I pivoted and landed upon the area of scheduling, this is in fact my first prototype in this space.

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My thesis idea will focus on the group that Dunbar’s Number refers to as intimate friends with some spill over into what he calls close friends. My goal isn’t to help someone to maintain all of their friendships. My goal is to help someone to maintain the friendships that really matter to them.

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The Smart Scheduling system involves four phases: Initiate, Collaborate, Agree, and Arrive.

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Narrative arc.

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I haven't personally used Fantastical, but based on this video my first impression is that it is very overwhelming. The features look great, but I don't know if I need all of those features. Although, it does look like a great business tool.

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I've been using the Google Calendar app for iPhone, and it's pretty decent. The design is very clean, exactly what you'd expect from Google, I love that it scrubs my emails for events and automatically adds it to my calendar. Google Maps integration is also a nice feature. However, it's still a typical calendar app, and much better than the standard iOS Calendar app.