For Grand

Ideation & Sketching

My team decided on the idea for our app after doing some research on the target user group and brainstorming. After agreeing on the concept, we each sketched out ideas for the core function's interface. We then worked together on a call to decide on a “final” sketch to continue with and present for feedback, including features such as individual food and activity items, the categories they would be sorted in, and a filter to find results suited for a specific child.

Mockups & Colour

After receiving feedback from the TA on the sketches we made, we made some changes to the design and decided what the other main pages on the navigation bar would be. There are a Community page, where users could make and view posts about what their grandchildren enjoy; a Family page, where the users could add and view information about their grandchildren; and an Account page, where users could change their settings and view their favourited items.

We then made high-fidelity mockups of some of the app's pages using Figma, and I was responsible for the home page and its subpages, which are used for the app's main function. We decided to use blue and/or yellow to give off a feeling of happiness, and I created various versions of the same layout to explore different colour palettes and decide which one we thought worked best.

We decided to use the blue and yellow colour palette at the bottom left of the image above. Through research, we learned that users of the target audience may see blue as more faded, and chose to use yellow for the buttons to make them stand out more.

Prototyping

For the next stage, we expanded on our mockups and imported them into ProtoPie to make a working interactive prototype. Each member of our team prototyped the pages they made mockups for, so my role was to make the prototype for the home page, its subpages, and main functions.

After receiving feedback on our first prototype, I added buttons to the horizontal scrolls on the home page to give users the option to scroll by tapping, in case of dexterity issues.

Here we also faced the challenge of finding a way for information about the grandchildren's preferences to be added by other family members, such as the parents. After some thinking and discussion, we decided to have an external webpage where anyone with the link, which can be copied from the app, could add the information. I added this feature in the prototype of the app.

When the time came to conduct usability tests with user participants, we planned out the testing procedure to focus on ease of completing specific tasks. We decided to time how long the users took to complete the tasks and take notes on qualitative observations, then interview them at the end. I conducted the study with three participants by sending them the link to the prototype and completing the testing procedure with them.

Based on the insight we gained from the usability study, we implemented changes to resolve common issues. The changes I made to the home page and its related pages included changing the label on the filter button to make it easier to identify and understand, adding a description on the filter page to help the user understand the feature, and moving the favourite icon on the item page to be below the image of the item to make it more noticeable.