Author: Sara Birchard

I downloaded Citizen after a friend told me about how morbid and depressing it is. Citizen allows users to see what is happening around them based on 911 reports. While it’s totally morbid, I find the app super informative since I’m always curious about what is going on in the neighborhood.

About Me

I was born & raised in the East Village, just a few blocks away from Parsons. I studied psychology for my undergrad and after graduating, I took an immersive UX Design course at General Assembly. Since then, I have been doing freelance UX and have found myself primarily designing mobile apps.

3 things I didn’t know from the HIG

1. Avoid permanently hiding the status bar. I never actually knew that it was an option to hide the status bar until I played the Animal Crossing game for iOS. I thought that it was a poor choice on their part because I forced me to leave the app to check the time. It makes sense that Apple would strongly advise against it but I never really thought about it until now.
2. Custom Keyboards. I didn’t know that this was an option either. In all of the apps that I’ve helped design, it never even came up as a consideration. I’m sure that I’ve seen it before in some apps but just totally ignored the fact that it was different from Apple’s dark and light themes.
3. App Icon Customization. This is also something that I didn’t know was possible. According to the HIG, you can provide a set of app icons within your app and allow the user to choose which one displays on their phone.

About the App

For my food app, I created an app that is essentially a social media platform for chefs to share recipes. It works similarly to Instagram in that you can follow chefs, discover new chefs, and even post as a chef yourself. This is the very rough framework for how the app will function.

App Map

Wireframes