Design Student Assessment

To begin this assessment, we were given a short description of 3 different briefs. Here we did a 7 step analysis of each one coming up with rough ideas and seeing which one we would like to proceed with.

All briefs were interesting, and this process helps get a feel for any ideas we have for the potential briefs and what their requirements might be. Having done this, I chose the brief for Sustainable Victoria where it would be an app about growing and cooking your own food. Only then was I able to see the brief in its entirety and have a look at all the concepts I was required to explore. There are 3 concepts for different approaches to the same brief.

Concept 1:

To design the app specifically for users living in urban areas and are space poor. This means my app has to have all the relevant information for growing food in small areas and even in pots. Some of these spaces may include a small backyard or balcony spaces. I looked back over my 7 steps and made a rough journey map for my user and began sketching ideas on a tablet.

Here I went through all I had and noted designs I liked the idea of and started on some wireframes and experimented more with the app layout until I had mapped the entire app. Here is an image of the wire frames.

Next was pure aesthetics as I designed Hi-fidelity mockups and kept going back and forth to the Sustainable Victoria Webpage looking at their design language and tried to find something that suited the existing aesthetics. Here are my final images.

Concept 2:

This concept was probably the most challenging for me, I was required to make my design using the Photon Design Language. This concept was purely aesthetic variation and using the existing design language with rigid rules to be followed.

Following the same steps as concept 1 I started with sketching and ideation, experiment with logos and the app layout while studying the existing language.

Next was the wire frames shown below where I mapped out the app and what was needed. The Hi-fidelity mocks for this concept was going to be the biggest challenge.

Following the language I turned 4 frames into hi-fi mocks for this app, its not the style that I would normally use but was a really great experience working with this style and seeing how design in real life for companies will actually be like.

Concept 3:

This concept was based on accessibility. This was very interesting as I read up on visual impairments and how they affect using the web and even navigating game menus. Keeping this new information in mind I sketched some ideas.

Due to my limited experience in this are of design I made my wireframes knowing they could be better but not knowing how to make them better. This is an area I would love to do more research on and interact with design that cater to accessibility more.

In the mock up stage I tried to pay a lot of attention to colour and make sure everything had good contrast and spacing. I added a lot of buttons to increase text size and a menu option for having text read aloud, altering the colour of the design and another way to change text input. The other area I considered for visually impaired users was instead of having the recipes based more on images there was an option to have them listed to make text to speech easier and more descriptive. So the recipe was described and not the image description.

This was a fun process, being challenged with the different concepts and learning what I can do better in the future.