Mobile Media

I have two ideas for food-related apps.

1. Food Dictionary: I often run into situations where I don’t understand a good portion of the menu/ingredients at restaurants. So I’m interested in making a food dictionary app that can be helpful in such situations. The app will contain general information + images of various cuisines from around the world and their commonly used ingredients. In short, this app will be a visual dictionary specifically for food, and I think it could be particularly useful when traveling abroad. 

2. Gummy Bear Weather: A weather app with a gummy bear theme… Perhaps this will make any sort of weather feel nicer? In this app, whether it is snowy, rainy, sunny, etc., everything will be represented through gummy bear imageries. This app isn’t exactly meant to solve specific design issues, but rather, is purely for fun.

I have two ideas about food app, these are all about healthy life.

1. A bowl of China. This app focuses on the Chinese food culture, according to Chinese theory of “Wu Xing”, recommend kinds of vegetable, meat or fruit you should eat. The idea based on a question ” What to eat?”, every meal time I would ask myself this question. Modern people pursue healthy life, and they prefer eat healthy also. “Wu Xing” also known as the Five Elements, it is a fivefold conceptual scheme that many traditional Chinese fields used to explain a wide array of phenomena, from cosmic cycles to the interaction between internal organs. The “Five Phases” are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water.

2. Calories Manager. The function is let you know the calories intake everyday, and how to take some exercise to consume these calories, and keep your body a good healthy situation.

I have 2 ideas.
1. Idea of thai food shopping app for NewYorkers. Based on personal problem my friends sometime don’t know where to buy the ingredients and material. My app will generate ingredients and materials depending on what Thai dish do you want to cook. Then it shows a shopping list that you can carry on your phone to buy materials around your grocery store around your area.

2. I have an idea based on my personal problem that I’ve eaten mushroom that didn’t cook very well. Then, I got a bad stomachache and puke a lot. Another inspiration is from in to the wild movie that the actor, Alex accidentally ate poisoned plant then he died. With these experiences, I found an inspiration from youtube video ” Savage in the wild.”

I would like to create an app that shows area of  free herb, plants to eat or to cook as a healthy food. This app also educates New Yorkers to know the different between each edible plants.

Jamba juice app

Waiting in line sometimes is no fun. Use the Jamba Juice app to design your own smoothie or play the game the catch the fruits and create random smoothies.

login to order (design/create) your smoothie while in store, Beacon will connect your phone to the register and process the order. You can also pay with the app. It saves your time and make your time in store more fun.

1.If you buy vegetables in the market, you need to swipe your bank card, at the same time, this app can obtain the detailed list from bank card, and save the information in this app. Because you can’t always remember what’s missing from your fridge. So this app can help you to know that what kinds of food you need to buy and your have bought something. And also this app can remind that what kinds of food that you can’t eat  together.

2. A lot of people do not want to waste time on cooking, because they have to spend a lot of time to peer into the pan. So this app which can remind you when the food is ready. Of course, you need to set up different way of cooking in your App.

While using the Android apps, I’ve not deeply thought about the guideline behind them. I guess because of the different limitation and defaults, Android apps naturally differ from iOS apps visually and in the UX way. After reading the Android design guideline, I recalled the design of my old phones. 10 years ago, the phones did whatever you wanted them to do. It was dumb that people have to try to adjust. Also, old phones varied in UI/UX designs, switching phones was a big deal. people had to spent time learning to use the phone. Especially I remember, I was very afraid of pressing buttons. Sometimes, I accidentally deleted content. Without notices and intuition, I was surprised by how the old phones treated me. In contrast, in Android design guideline, I saw “If it looks the same, it should act the same” and “Decide for me but let me have the final say” which saved people from being lost in the interface and learning and remembering all the different functions.

However, something I feel interesting in the guideline is “It’s not my fault – Be gentle in how you prompt people to make corrections. They want to feel smart when they use your app. If something goes wrong, give clear recovery instructions but spare them the technical details. If you can fix it behind the scenes, even better.” This point indicates how people feel frustrated because of the failure of technology. However, I don’t think a user will feel him/herself dumb because of the technology failure, which means, you do not need to make them feel smart. There were so many times my apps or phone failed. I never blame myself but the stupid phone or developer. I just hope the phone is as smart as me.

Anyways, the guideline was clear on what direction Android would like to go, but I still believe there is a long road for all smart phones/apps to be intuitive or smart like a human. As apps/UI/UX evolve to fit human needs, humans also learn to use technology products. It is why things need to get improved at all time.

According Android Guidelines, i found three designs that surprised me. Also i list those as follow.

1.Use illumination and dimming to respond to touches, reinforce the resulting behaviors of gestures, and indicate what actions are enabled and disabled. Be responsive to touches in a gentle way. Whenever a user touches an actionable area in your app, let them know the app is “listening” by providing a visual response. Make it subtle —just slightly lighter or darker than the untouched color. This provides two benefits:

• • Sprinkles of encouragement are more pleasant than jolts.
• • Incorporating your branding is much easier because the default touch feedback works with whatever hue you choose

2.Use color primarily for emphasis. Choose colors that fit with your brand and provide good contrast between visual components. Note that red and green may be indistinguishable to color-blind users.

3.The app’s launcher icon is a key place to incorporate logo, because it’s what users will look for and touch to begin using app. They can carry the launcher icon through to all the screens in app by showing it in the action bar along with the name of the app.

One thing that surprised me most is “define your app” from iOS Guidelines. I never thought the definitions of the users could be so different; as the “grocery shopping app” example, there are eight kinds of users’ categories that have different habits. Users who like cooking at home VS. having ready-made meals, users who prefer to special ingredients VS. stick to basics, users who like to follow the step strictly VS. follow their inspirations, ect. Now I can see how important the definition of an app is, and I will try to make this early in my design process. But finding all the categories of the users isn’t enough, I have to decide which of them I want to keep on my app, and filter the feature list; also make sure to use my final app definition throughout the whole design process.

How to provide users with feedback is a new content for me; letting users know the results and updating progress are all ways in order to track the change visually. And there are three ways to achieve this goal: 1. highlight list items and controls at least a few seconds. 2. design subtle animations. 3. add sound( but not always).

I also found some differences between iOS and Android Design; in Android System, real objects are important, because more fun will exist than buttons and menus. But in iOS system, real objects are not that important, especially in the simple graphic UI design. Also, in iOS system, home screen doesn’t exist.

Noodle logo app

Wireframes

Our prototype

Concept
With the parameters of being in the Entertainment Category, having to do with Noodles and being targeted towards single people in their 20-30s our group decided to create a mobile application that helps set up lunch dates. The idea being that you can post a combination of a date, time or location where you would like to meet for lunch and other people in your work environment could join if they have an opening in their schedule. Nobody wants to eat lunch on their own, and often when someone is leaving their office or work environment for their lunch break they need to circulate around the office and ask around to see who would like to join them, with this application we are improving upon that interaction. The application allows for people to set lunch meetings and they are notified when others want to join in on their gatherings. Users gain a score based on how many meetings they attend in order to give the users a sense of security when meetings somebody new because they can see the users history.