Group Project Ideas

Team: Carrol (Tingjian) Shen, Kamilla Kielbowska, and Seungkyun Lee

1. An app for controlling and interacting with a smart home environment. Here, a smart home environment could include, for example, refrigerators, air conditioners, heaters, lights, plant-watering devices, etc. The target users in this case would be whoever lives or wants to live in a smart home environment.

2. A mobile game where users guess each others’ locations based on photos. In a nutshell, this is Snapchat + GeoGuessr + Quizup. Using this app, a user will snap a photo of a landscape/landmark/object/etc in his/her current location, send the photo to other users, and those who received the photo will guess where that photo was taken. The photos will disappear once the receiver opens it, so that’s the Snapchat element. This could be a fun activity whenever and wherever you are, but we’re also thinking this could be fun while traveling as well.

Covet Fashion [Thursday Plays]

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“Covet Fashion gives users the freedom to shop and style with over 80 designers’ collections & build complete head-to-toe looks. Covet Fashion is the best way for brands to connect to their target audiences on mobile and tablet.” – Covet Fashion

This app does a great job of organizing a lot of information and making it easy to navigate. I also really like the way it links you to the real-world items, allowing you to shop directly from your phone during play.

 

For Next Week, Mar 20

Working in the group of two or three that we found established last week pitch two or three concepts for your second, and final project. In your pitch, describe who you’re making this app for and what you’re going to do for them.

The topic of this app can be anything you want, and you can make this app for the phone or a tablet. Just define those things upfront.

HIG Response

After reading the “iOS Human Interface Guidelines”, I realized the design of mobile apps basically should follow the guidelines, because the apps are on the iOS platform, as a designer, I should know deeply about what iOS7’s concept, what iOS7’s advantage and restrict, what iOS7 designers care about and what they have done.

I aware that the legibility is so important, because of the mobile screen is smaller in contrast with other interfaces, the text must be legible at every size. I also noticed the iPhone apps’ text size normally controlled in the limit of 22pt to 34pt.

Use plenty of negative space, this rule is what I need to follow, I always try to express more in this limited screen, and the consequence is all information looks like crowed, and no one want to pick the information in such a mess screen. Negative space is very helpful to highlight the real important text.

The confusing part is the more important area is on the upper left corner, I always consider it should be in the center, because of the iPhone’s screen is small. But when the whole page is all texts, like a novel, the most important area must be on the upper left corner, according to people reading habit. Only if images on this view, the most important area should be the center or on the image area, I’m not sure it is right.

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I noticed some well-designed apps not follow the frame of UIKit, they do not have navigation bar or tab bar, if they do not want use these tool, they have to design a simple way to let users learn their frame and how to interact part quickly and easily.