App Jam – Designing

Moving from an idea to the beginnings of a concept started by exploring what the app does, who the app is for and what the features are. At this stage it is important to narrow down features, cutting out any that are unnecessary or bloat the app. During this stage I came up with many more ideas and I could have cut the features down even more in order for it to be easier to use, more streamlined and specified. Looking back I now feel that I have tried to combine too many features into the app, but by the time of realising it was too late to change. Whilst the Eco-points are an interesting feature I think I could have gamified the app in order to promote sustainable behaviour and simplify the app. Also exploring where to buy sustainable food is good how often do you shop at multiple shops to get your produce. This is not something many people do and therefore may be a redundant feature.

The next step was to turn these features into paper prototypes. This was a quick way to come up with ideas for how the app works, how users interact with it and thinking about how features work together. At this stage I was purely thinking about user experience and how that relates to the features. I did also start mapping out a user scenarios but I soon found that this was just confirming my assumptions as to how the app should work. This was a good task that helped me hone the app, but for an app jam I do not think it is relevant. This is not to say user research and mapping doesn’t have a place but I now feel that through gut feeling, prototyping and iterations the user experience becomes clearer and more refined. Exploring how design sprints test their concepts during their 5 day prototyping session leads me to think that in 48 hours using gut feelings and empathy are better methods than heavy user research.

User scenarios

Initial app storyboards

The paper prototypes were refined and then moved into a basic wireframe allowing me to see how the app works and how you interact with the features. All digital prototyping was done in Figma and during this app Jam I was not focussing on programming due to my grater familiarity with UI design over my knowledge of coding. As seen below the wireframe was a good basis for setting out the pages needed and allowed me to start refining features and the interface itself.

Initial app wireframe in Figma

From the wireframes I started to iterate further quickly improving the app pages and features. Adding content, colour scheme and prototyping further pushed this project.

Detailed app prototype 

Whilst during the early parts of the process I came across problems in lack of understanding and knowledge of agile design methodologies, here I came across problems in time management. It took me a lot longer to design and prototype the app than I wanted. In the future I will first design the wireframes and then create a style guide for the app in order to speed up the process of inserting content, buttons etc. This is down to a lack of effective workflow at the moment and I will quickly get on top of this problem.