Research of Existing Apps

Today, towards the end of the class, we were given some time to go through and look at some existing apps, as well as download a few to try them out, and see exactly what was good and bad with their interfaces, so we could both gather some effective ideas, and also know what sorts of interface designs to avoid. A few that we looked at online have been attached to this blog post below.

Most of them, although being quite easy to navigate, just started off with a whole set of categories to choose from, rather than just using a couple to narrow down the options. The second one down, "Here U Go" is one that Alfred and I downloaded, and it was extremely poorly designed. Not only does it look bad aesthetically, it's also not very well designed in terms of layout. As you can see in the screenshot below, it shows the large, large list of categories that there are available. To make things worse, it has been placed in alphabetical order. By doing this, it makes it extremely difficult to navigate, as some things might be called something else and put under a different letter. For example, you might be looking for "Mechanics", when it has been placed under "A" for "Auto Repair", which leaves it relatively far away from where you were looking.

Another one that we analysed, although was downloaded on Alfred's phone (as he switched his iTunes account to U.S to download), so I don't have any screenshots of it, was an app which allows the user to choose their activity based on how they were feeling. There were a few different options such as "lively", "classy", and "whatever". Once you clicked on how you were feeling, it generated a list of all sorts of places and activities that applied to how you were feeling when searching. We felt that an idea similar to this would be quite handy to use or develop when we come to developing our own interface.

Most of the screenshots below are from android apps, although each of them show that there is no real point where they begin with only a couple of options, all of them seem to have heaps of choices to make right at the beginning. We are going to make sure that we begin with only a limited number of choices at the beginning of our app in order to try and make it more successful than all of these ones below. Another aspect of the below apps are that they take quite a few steps to get to the end result, so we will also try and make it so our app can go from start to finish in between 3 and 5 interactions if possible.

Right at the end of the class, we began sketching a few more ideas on how we could layout our interface, and had another small discussion with Stu on our newer ideas. He gave some more feedback on how to develop and simplify these even further, so we will definitely take these into strong consideration when creating our next InVision prototype. By next week, we have been asked to create another InVision prototype, although this time it is to be created digitally rather than drawn and transferred onto the computer.

Below is the page of our sketches with some ideas for certain screens in our new layout.