An eventual home screen iteration.
Gallery Pal:
1-Week Design Sprint
All the depth gallery-vistors want,
and ONLY the depth they want.
Google Ventures' Design Sprint Process
Time-constrained, five-phase process, applying Design Thinking with the aim of reducing the risk of bringing a new product or service to the Market.
Understand the audience, and the value proposition.
Diverge with the thinking to generate a wide range of approaches to the problem.
Converge the thinking onto a few main ideas for exploration & development.
Prototype as early as possible, for testing with the target audience.
Test the prototype with individuals in that target audience.
Good Design
anticipates
the User's Experience.
anticipates
the User's Experience.
1: Understanding the User's perspective
I started with in-depth information from a user identified as the target audience.
The Main Problem is to provide user-controlled depth of information.
"Once you know about certain artists' details, they pop out at you!" - Lena
We needed to be ready with in-depth information for users who want to dive deeply.
And we need to allow the user to control whether or not to dive deeply - don't give a whole article when a sentence would do.
There's also a technical problem, of connecting the user directly to the information they need.
QR Codes address this issue, but are not universally-applicable.
2: Diverging through Sketch
Lightning Demos
I looked into image-recognition solutions from:
Amazon Mobile
Google Lens
eBay Motors
Results were inconsistent and unreliable, so I reverted to the idea of using QR Codes. Once the target artwork is identified, user can tap on different cards for artist, dates, media, context, etc.
Crazy-8 sketches
I quickly sketched out 8 different home screens to explore alternate layouts. By limiting each sketch to 1 minute, I focused on simplicity.
Solution Sketch
I selected my favorite from the divergent sketches, and fleshed out some details.
3: Converge with Decisions
Returning to the selected Solution Sketch from the previous day, I developed a deeper understanding of the Information Architecture that would be best.
The Information Architecture is intentionally shallow - I find this a natural way to allow the user to easily select their level of detail.
In Storyboard Development I kept the Architecture as shallow as possible; the whole app has only 4 levels of depth, so the user can easily select More Detail or Less Detail.
4: Prototype for testing
Adobe XD
I built out a prototype in Adobe XD, representing the architecture I had in mind.
Colors and Fonts were quickly selected to be easy on the eyes, and relaxing to use.
5: Validate
Testing mostly validated my design, but of course there were areas to clean up.
Some users were not understanding that they could scroll the content, so I adjusted spacing and added text and illustrations to get that across.
While observing the users, I also observed details in the app, that I would want to improve in later iterations. For example, after the testing I added a low-opacity background photo.
5
Phases
5
Days
5
User Tests
1
Hefty Prototype