Melinda Chen Week 1 + 2

Week One

My name is Melinda Chen. I am a rising senior at Parsons School of Design studying Graphic and Fashion Design. I currently intern at Highsnobiety doing creative services including strategy and graphic design. I want to study interaction design because I believe that design should be human over product. It is sometimes no longer about if something is technically “able” to be built, it is about why would we build this product.

Learnings from ios

  • a Glyph is a template image of the app icon without colors. It should have transparency, anti-aliasing, and no drop shadow. Prepare glyphs with a scale factor of @2x and save them as PDFs, because PDFs allows for high-resolution scaling.
  • Design a launch screen that’s nearly identical to the first screen of your app. If you include elements that look different when the app finishes launching, people can experience an unpleasant flash between the launch screen and the first screen of the app. Don’t advertise on the launch screen
  • Pickers are scrollable lists that are organized into a logically and predictable list 
  • A stepper is a two-segment control used to increase or decrease an incremental value.
  • It is interesting to see that they suggest to avoid language that might sound patronizing. Avoid we, our, me, and my (for example “our tutorial” and “my workouts”). They’re sometimes interpreted as insulting or patronizing.

APP concept

HomeCooked

An App dedicated to International students/workers and immigrates who wants a taste of home. It allows people to hosts potluck or join a potluck.

 

I designed three scenes, please ignore the branding for now.

The first screen shows the welcome screen (might change that)

The second screen is after the user chooses a cuisine, she sees the listed potluck hosted by other people

The third screen is a potluck called “Italian Fam” where the host has requested a few dishes. The user can choose to join the dinner or request more dishes to be at the dinner.

 

Week 2

I have had many constructive feedback from my peers and have decided to change a few things about my app.

First, I realized that the name HomeCooked has already been taken by an App with similar function. I downloaded the App and have tried to create an account and login however it seems that App might not be ready for general users.

Second, instead of focused on only international students. This app could be targeted to the general public. The reason being, not every person define their “home cooking” or “taste of home” as the cuisine of where they live and born. They might have had immigrate parents who cooked their traditional dishes at home, but their kids define themselves as Americans.

Third, there should be a function where users could contribute money in order to join a dinner. For example, if someone lived in Peru with a host family for a year but she

This would change the whole designing of the App. The functions will be less limiting to defining where the user’s home country cuisine, the app should focus more on generating a community where people could try out all different kinds of cuisine depending on their preferences and should all have a way of contributing to the potluck somehow.

aI will have the prototype and interactions link through this week’s post.