Class Work

In class today, we went around the class and each group of 2 discussed their 3 ideas that they had come up with for a potential interface design. Out of our three, Stu preferred the ones that experimented more with the use of geo-location on smart phones, and thought that this would give us more freedom to expand and experiment on.

Alfred and I thought that experimenting with geo-location would be new and exciting, so we ended up deciding to go with our 'Wellington Activity Planner', which gives the users all the information required to find all sorts of cool places to go, and activities to do in the Wellington region. In class, we were asked to come up with a list of interactions that are required to get the user to the end result. Our interface will be for smart phones, which allows us to find the users location. Our initial ideas for this were as follows...

1 - Unlock phone
2 - Click to open the app
3 - User will be asked to allow access to their location (first time only)
4 - Pick a category (e.g: walks, shops, food, live events)
5 - Choose basic or advanced search (advanced takes user to a set of questions which allows them to narrow down their options based on a series of factors)
6 - User will receive a list of recommended places or activities
7 - Choose place or activity
8 - User will be given information and pinpointed on Google Maps

We also discussed the possibility of a few other features...

"Save" - This would be an option that appears once the journey has been planned, and gives the user the chance to access this journey at a later date without needing to repeat the process of answering questions and re-finding their event or activity. The saved section would appear when the app opens, alongside a "New" button.

"Add" - We thought that when the list of activities come up, we could add a little plus button which allows the user to add the journey to a 'to do list' or 'favourites' section. This would allow them to then go to the 'Planned' section at the very start and see which events they had previously planned on doing.

We started drawing up a few ideas of how the interface and layout could look, and we both felt that this interface idea would develop very nicely, and we both continued to think of extra ideas to develop the app.

By next week, we were asked to draw up some layout ideas in a sequential order, and then go onto the 'In Vision' site that we were introduced to at the end of class. Stu asked us to have a mock-up interface made on there by next class.