Week 11’s content was similar to week 10. We spent our lecture focusing on our second project in preparation for our critique coming next week.
I was glad to have time to work on adding buttons to my design this week. Although I was at a good point with my overall design and would say it was near the point that i would be happy to show at the critique, I hadn’t yet added any buttons. Of course, for an app, this is essential for navigation and organisation.
The reason I hadn’t added these yet is that I was quite torn on where to place these and had a range of concepts. Going into this week, I was (unconfidently) planning to go with the following design.
However, I received some feedback that this looked more like a timeline than a series of buttons. I agreed and decided to change my design. Now, I am super glad that I decided to change these as upon taking a step back and looking at these with a clear mind, I agree that these don’t look like buttons. There is no indication that a user should click these, which would lead to confusion and frustration with navigating. Instead, I went back to my original idea of a sleeker and more minimalist design of placing navigation keys in the footer bar. This means that they can be seen on each page, creating less confusion and are also a much clearer form of navigation as most users will recognise that symbols are buttons.
The symbols used for Previous, Home, Who is JMB, Conclusion and Next were all sourced from feather icons.
For The Swiss Style, The Grid and Lasting Legacy buttons, I couldn’t find any icons that matched what I had in mind. I ended up creating these myself, using the same line weights and icon size as the others so that they would blend in.
These changes contribute to:
Project 02 - Design Digital Bio App
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Overall, I was glad to have this week to continue working on my projects, with a particular focus on project 2. I feel that I am making great progress with my project so far and am very confident that I will be able to meet the deadline of this with ease.
Taking the time during our lecture this week to focus on my navigation was very useful, as finalising what I wanted my navigation to look like was needed to allow me to move forwards in the design process. Although my first draft design of this wasn’t what I ended up using, I’m glad that I recognised what I liked and dislikes about it to create a much stronger navigation system. I will carry this experience with me in my future projects as an example of how failures in design are disappointing at the time, but can always be built upon to construct a much stronger result.
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