melisa gutierrez
profolio
Mid-September, during the beginning of the semester, we had an opportunity to join the Amazon and Adobe Creative Jam competition since classes were not heavy yet. It was a week long competition, but the biggest reason we joined was because we had an opportunity to talk to an Amazon Mentor.
We give a shoutout to Annie, an UXD from Amazon who focused her work on Amazon's Alexa and for her giving us advice and direction for our app.
Amazon's theme was 'Discovering Design' which alone was a broad word. I had an idea with it though because I was an artist and when I was looking into going into design, I wished I had a portfolio from the years from high school since a lot of art colleges require a portfolio on application.
We then realized that many students are probably in the same situation I was in several years ago. So, that was our idea of Discovering Design. Here is the theme and prompt.
Design a tablet app (Android, Fire, iPad, etc.) to provide a safe way for high school students (ages 13+) to #DiscoverDesign. This app should encourage students to:
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Discover what design is and how they interact with it every day
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Help them see the impact of good or bad design
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Encourage them to explore jobs/careers in designs
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Inspire them to start their own career in design.
Since I had a personal experience with this, I immediately got to work.
Planning
We wanted to create an app that allowed the users to draw on the app, store their art/designs, upload them to a folder, access a network to connect to other designs, and badges/achievements to encourage the users to continue exploring more designs.
Our personal themes were positivity, pastel branding, and welcoming others. We separated the app into the following pages:
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Drawing Tablet
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Storage
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Explore
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Network
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Badges
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Settings
Drawing Tablet
While we knew that our app would not be centered around a drawing tablet, having the option would definitely set our app apart among everyone else. Also, it would be a good customer experience design practice since users may not have the chance to get an expensive design application like Procreate.
We inspired our drawing tablet from Photoshop, and I designed the icons and imported them into the app. I also thought of the idea to make the toolbar moveable as I always have that option set for my Photoshop canvas. I remarked it as, "If you're drawing, it would be easier to move a toolbar to get it out of the way."
It also gives users the opportunity to download photos to the device or save them to the app. We would have the option for users to download the photos as different file types (.heic, .img, .png, and .jpg) since we recognize that users do not have one consistent file type.
Storage
Because Profolio is a 'portfolio', we needed a storage space where users can access their work within their own portfolio and get the work from other users' portfolios as inspiration or sharing. It works similarly to making a playlist on YouTube.
Also, the user has the ability to lock the portfolio so that other users cannot access it. It's a good practice for users who save their work-in-progress pieces in the app and do not want to share it yet.
Explore
Similar to how trends work today with hashtags, we wanted to inspire users to discover design by having them work on design challenges that would be provided in the Explore page. It's like how TikTok encourages their users to follow new trends.
So if the user clicked on the hashtag in the Explore Page, it would give a gallery of other users who sent their works under that hashtag. It helps new users with inspiring ideas of what to design and also discover new design out there.
Network
I designed the network page. I wanted to make it professional and engaging with the users. The style is similar to LinkedIn's UI, where the users can have access to their achievements, profile, and trends. Additionally, in the feed, they can see everyone they decided to follow or connect. Say you met a graphic designer who is very experienced, connecting with them would give you advice for future job offers.
On the network page, I added four settings to choose for the post:
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Photo - which posts a photo with a caption that you have to upload
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Video - which posts a video with a caption that you have to upload
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Portfolio - which posts either a photo or video from your portfolio
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Challenge Me - which is innovative in its own way where followers and connections can comment on design challenges for you to attempt and that you have to post. It allows for a good network competition.
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Of course, users can post things on the Network tab without adding media.
Badges
Badges and achievements which are similar to the previous AirBnB competition encouraged users to continuously explore features in the app which then would allow them to 'discover design'. An example of a badge would be 'Woo Hoo! Your first meeting with a designer! Schedule 5 more meetings to see what happens'.
We know that gamification would be a motivating factor for high school students to explore more on the app.
Settings
Will implemented the settings menu of the app. We wanted to make it an extending menu where the menu would go over the current page. This was really difficult to implement in XD since we had to duplicate a lot of screens, but it would also remind the user what page they were currently working on. (i.e. if they were working on the drawing tablet, used the settings page, they would expect to be back on the drawing tablet after they finished in settings).
Also, the settings page when opened is the basic navigation to access different parts of the app, like the Feed, Community, and Personal Storage pages.
Additionally, to better protect one's account, users could implement 2FA to protect against hackers, and users can change their email, username, and password in this area.
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Final Thoughts
We could have used our time more wisely, plan more, which would let us prototype more and add more design elements. I enjoyed that she provided a lot of vital parts like the Network UI and overall colorful design. Also, I liked the prompt, since I and a lot of fellow designers relate to it, so I put myself into it and made the app more intimate. It gave me a chance to standout.
I would put more time into the Networking UI, and if we had more time, I wanted to add classes about design, but I did like designing the branding.
For me, Will says that I did a really good job with making myself stand out, but he wishes we had more time planning this. We definitely could have done more with it, but he said my branding really stood out in a good way, and it made the app more friendly
