FUNCITY
Team Natalie Cheng, Nijhum Mohammad
My role Brainstorming, presentation, research, design mockups for both interface and interactions
Context A three-week school project from UX design class in 2016.
WHY FUNCITY
Many students find it difficult to look for events or activities to do during weekends due to their busy schedule. They are often lazy or extremely busy to plan ahead their activities for the weekend.
To solve the issue we are designing an app that lists all the possible activities in specific locations that one could do in Vancouver, including categories of sports, games, events, movies and food. In the app, the user could customize his or her plan by selecting from the list of activities or select randomly to generate a plan, the user could then share the plan with his or her friends.
STYLE GUIDE
USER FLOW
CONDUCT USER SURVEY
In order to optimize the user experience, we conduct user surveys with university students online to learn about their preferences including popular activities, share methods and feature preferences. Based on the insights we got from the survey, I further improved the interface with group mates.
POPULAR ACTIVITIES
We are interested in learning the preferred activities of potential users. Based on the results, we learned that food and movies are the major preferred activities.
Iteration - Home Screen
For these reasons, I arranged movies as the first category and food as the last category for them to easily find them.
SHARE METHODS
We would like to learn about how users prefer to share plans or send messages to friends about the plan they made.
Iteration - Message Function
Based on the results, we learned that they prefer to share the plan within the app, I integrated share button into the plan for users to easily share within the app and designed the workflow below for a more smooth user experience.
It will bring up a list of friends for user to choose from
Choose a certain friend by tapping on the circle on the right side and it will show up as a tick which also activates the send button
After tapping the send button, the plan will be sent successfully to friends, the user could also send messages to friends.
Tap on the arrow button for share function under the plan
CUSTOMIZE PLAN
One of the main features of the app is customizing a plan. By selecting from each category, the user could add any activity they like to the plan.
During the process, after designing the interface, I added a sub-menu bar on the top for easier navigation based on TA's feedback. Using the basic interaction template I made from Principle, Natalie, one of the group mates improved the interactions by making the header change based on the scrolling.
RANDOMIZE PLAN
Another main feature of the app is randomizing a plan. Simply tapping on the "Randomize a Plan" button, the app will generate five random plans for users to choose from and they could further edit it as their own plan.
During the process, we tried different layout for the scrolling of the random plans and found out that this horizontal scrolling works the best from the user testing that we conduct.
APP INTERACTION VIDEO
PROJECT EVALUATION
• Understand the users
Before designing the interface, it is important to fully understand the users. This could be done by making personas which includes evaluating their pain points and creating the user flow diagram to optimize their experience. Later in the design process, conducting surveys and user testing could also help to learn about users’ preferences and flaws of the design to make improvements.
• Provide feedback on user interaction
In this project, we focus on providing enough feedback to users to provide comfort and a sense of security for them. By integrating different types of feedback, such as output text or color changes, it allows user to visualize their actions.
