Author: drewcogbill

Assignments for April 29

Create wireframes for your chosen concept and post them to the blog before class. You will be presenting them for discussion in class.

I’d suggest starting with iPhone wires and then considering how your app map and individual screen content might be different on the iPad. Depending on your app, it will likely be appropriate to have a complete set of iPhone and iPad wires.

Assignments for March 11

  • Post documentation (picture/video) and a few sentences of what you’ve learned through in class prototyping
  • Group 2 – Take your wireframes to the next step and create a design. This design should be the next step in your tightening your concept and more clearly thinking through the details of an actual user playing with your app. While I understand if you are not a visual designer, think about yours designs as something that could be built and put on the app store.
  • Start thinking about your Project 1 Final Presentation. You’ll have 8 minutes for presentation and feedback. The critics will be responding generally about your app concept and if the design you’re proposing helps accomplish the user’s goals that you’re presenting. Feel free and post more on the blog than you present, as I’ll be giving a much more thorough inspection of your finals designs after you present them.

Assignments for March 4th

  • Post documentation (picture/video) and a few sentences of what you’ve learned through in class prototyping
  • Group 1 – Take your wireframes to the next step and create a design. This design should be the next step in your tightening your concept and more clearly thinking through the details of an actual user playing with your app. While I understand if you are not a visual designer, think about yours designs as something that could be built and put on the app store.

Assignments for February 25

  • Wireframe group 2- create wireframes for your approved app concept and post them to the blog. Be prepared to present them and receive comments in 12 minutes. I’d suggest keeping your discussion to around 5-6 minutes.
  • Everyone- create either a paper prototype or a digital prototype using a simple tool such a POP (more on prototyping). While prototyping in class next week, document (take some pictures/video) to post to the blog along with a sentence or two about some interesting things you discovered while prototyping.
  • Special Topics Group 3 – iOS accessibility

On blog maintenance:

  • Please do go into the profile of your user and put in your name so that I can properly identify everyone per their username.
  • As a reminder, to get credit for all assignments, they will need to posted to the blog

Prototyping

Paper prototypes are a simulation of a digital interface with a paper. When paper prototyping, you print or draw your interface and have a tester interact with the paper like is a real, digital interface. You will play the part of the iPhone’s processor, moving things and performing actions that the phone would do. Paper prototyping is a way to quickly and with little effort test out our designs.

For your prototypes next week, you’ll have a chance to use several classmates to test out if your design works as you intend. You’ll want to prepare a goal or quest for your user to prompt them. Then, you’ll lay the first screen of your app in front of them. Test out all the aspects of your app that you’ve designed.

To be able to do this, you’ll need to iterate on the wireframes that you’ve done or wireframe for the first time all of the major screens of your app.

Tips:

  • Print out your mocks at a true to iPhone size.
  • If your app requires content (recipes, restaurants, etc.), you’ll want to provide your user with those. If you want someone to take a picture, have a separate cutout of a picture to throw onto the screen.
  • If you need the user to type, you may want to have a iPhone keyboard to put on top of your interface. This may be a good way to test if your interface needs to adjust in any way for the keyboard as well.

Alternatively, you may employ an digital prototype to test your concepts as well. Keep these lo-fi as well. You could make an interactive pdf, a simple mobile website, or use the app POP.

Assignments for February 11

  • Wireframe group 1- create wireframes for your approved app concept and post them to the blog. Be prepared to present them and receive comments in 12 minutes. I’d suggest keeping your discussion to around 5-6 minutes.
  • Everyone- create either a paper prototype or a digital prototype using a simple tool such a POP (more on prototyping). While prototyping in class next week, document (take some pictures/video) to post to the blog along with a sentence or two about some interesting things you discovered while prototyping.
  • Special Topics Group 2 – prepare a lecture on top Android apps

On blog maintenance:

  • Please DO NOT put your posts under the Assignments category. I’ll use that for posting the weekly assignments.
  • Please do go into the profile of your user and put in your name so that I can properly identify everyone per their username.
  • Please use the category #mondayplays for documenting any apps/games brought up in our app chats