Design decisions 2.0

Pilot prototype : 

https://www.fluidui.com/editor/live/preview/p_gwZEcD7z7s2BGR7FP2Znz7iPIEnFf7Mx.1464035845955

Final design prototype:

https://www.justinmind.com/usernote/tests/20286555/20286561/20286572/index.html

Walkthrough:

Disclaimer

Many of the buttons do not work since it is a prototype but they illustrate the end functions of the final product. 

Explanations of choices and improvements

It is obvious that there are some major differences between the prototype presented at exercise 5 and the prototype presented at the final exercise. Since there already is two different posts that discuss the feedback we have received both from the exercise group and from our user tests, we will not be discussing those here, but rather this post will serve as an insight in how we were thinking when we redesigned the prototype. 

When we revaluated our prototype we found ourselves thinking that, yes from an utilitarian point of view our design is excellent, but the user experience is not all that enjoyable. We thought at the time that the design was to "blocky" and did not look all too pleasing, it felt rough in a way. With that in mind in combination with the ideas of striking a balance between aesthetics and usability presented to us in one of the lectures, we decided that we needed to remake the design but not really the core functionality. This is something that can be observed when comparing the two prototypes, yes the design is different but at the core they are exactly the same. We attribute this to the fact that the choices and decisions that were made to build those core features where and are grounded in HCI theories and concepts. One of the mest obvious changes is that we changed all of the edges of the buttons from "edgy" to rounder to make the buttons appear more smooth. Our motivation behind this change is based in the psychology theories that where presented in the lectures. The idea is that straight edged buttons and interfaces disrupts the thought process of the user. 

Now when it comes to the aesthetics changes we have made we did not want to just do something that we ourselves though would look " aesthetic" since we are only four individuals and there was no possibility to ask a lot of people so our sample size(data gathering would be limited in other words) would be far to small to be reliable. What we did instead was that we turned to the course literature and lectures to guide us. Emotional interaction was a concept we thought was really interesting and we wanted to try and implement it in our prototype. The way in which we did this was for example to choose colour that would be rather mellow to try and calm the user, since we thought that our target group wanted to take it easy i.e. leisure travel and hence we wanted to do everything to reduces their stress levels. We included background imagery related to each tab, see for example the "gröna lund" page, this is an idea we got from the literature on page 138. 

We did not only improve the aesthetics of the prototype but we even tweaked the usability. The way we did was to try and implement the concept of external cognition in our prototype. Our thinking was that the user may not use our application for long periods of time, hence the user will not be spending enough time with the application to remember all the nooks and crannies. This coupled with what was said during the lecture that the human mind works really well with association and that association is often used to reduce memory load, we figured colour coding every section would add some externalizing to reduce said memory load. This is apparent in that for example all the information related to food is in the same colour as the food label at the home page and so on. 

We hope that this post does what it's aim was, which is to give a more thorough insight in our process and the thinking that have gone into each decision step.