This tool makes it look really easy to create a mobile app - we should try creating our app in this:

http://www.mobilenationhq.com/overview/

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As part of Experience Design 2, our group has decided to take different outings to get us inspired for our next project. Geocaching was something we'd talked about when we were developing our mobile app idea, but only one of us (Heidi) was an experienced geocacher. Geocaching involves using a GPS to search for hidden containers ('caches') in outdoor locations - Wikipedia describes it as 'a game of high-tech hide and seek'. I was surprised to learn there are over 1.3 million caches and 5 million geocachers all over the world, so it's a big community. 

What was the experience like?

We picked Nonsuch Park as the location for our geocaching and used Heidi's GPS to find the location of the first cache. Even though you can narrow down to an approximate area, it still takes quite a lot of searching to find a tiny camera film can in trees and bushes. This made it quite satisfying when we did manage to find it. The cache had a log book to sign which had a lot of signatures. It was strange to realise someone else found this same cache the same day as us, even though it was a pretty wet and windy day! The next couple of caches we found were easier and one was bigger, containing some trinkets and a travel bug (pictured below). This is a trackable tag that is attached to an item. It is taken from cache to cache by geocachers and can be tracked online. I was excited about finding these hidden treasures! Overall, it was a fun day that would be even better in dry weather! It was frustrating when we couldn't find a cache, but this made it more rewarding when we did. It's also a great way to explore places as you are encouraged to go off the beaten track following the GPS directions. A good starting point for our next innovation.

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I have finally had a chance to do some reading and looking at what we've done so far.  I had wanted to do this two weeks ago, before the craziness of the past couple of weeks settled in.  First I found an icon set I might be able to easily modify.  This one doesn't come with all the icons I was hoping for, but it does come with a tutorial for creating your own in the same style:

108 Mono Icons

I found some symbols in other sets that I do like.  Here's what I was thinking for each category:

• Events:  Calendar
• Friends:  Group of People
• Offers:  Price Tag
• University:  Graduation Cap/Motar Board Cap
• Profile:  Smiley Face

I've found all of these except the gradution cap in other sets.  I think a cap icon would be easy to find someplace else online for editing.

I read through the BlackBerry Design Guidelines, the big thing about the icons themselves that I read is to not use text and numbers in icons.  This helps with "localisation", for example if you have a $ for offers and we're designing the app for British students, that might not be appealing to them.  Though, if the app is eventually developed for American students, the icons will have to changed, so keeping it as simple as possible will allow it to be flexible.

Reading through the design guidelines I got some great tips on text disply too.  In summary:

• Fonts are inherited by the theme the user chooses.
• If you use multiple fonts, use fonts from the same font family.
• Avoid using bold for emphasis.
• Avoid using fixed font sizes and small font sizes.
• Avoid using italics and underlined text.
• Avoid using anti-aliasing with small fonts.
• Verify the UI is clear in low lighting.

There's a section on punctuation too:

• Punctuate labels for lists, text fields, and search field with a colon.
• Avoid using colons in titles.
• Use elipses in a button or label item to indicate that users must perform an action after they click the button.
• Avoid using single quotation marks.

There is a BlackBerry API that sets defaults, including fonts and such.  They recommend using this when developing, of course.

After reviewing the guidelines I started thinking about our homescreen though.  It still seems unecessary to me.  I'm also wondering if we should just move the icons right away to a toolbar to keep the consistency through the app?  Based on what I read, toolbars are set through a Toolbar function.  Each icon sits on a set canvas of 60x40 pixels, the average icon size needs to be 33x33 pixels.  This allows for suitable whitespace around the icons.  In most of the screenshots I saw, the toolbar was on the bottom, though the Facebook one is on top.  I'm not really sure which is the most used though.  Also the text under the icon on the home screen is unecessary.  The toolbar property allows tooltips to be set.  Most screenshots I saw didn't have text under the icons.  I think most apps rely on the tooltip property to save space on the app.  I think our reasoning for having the homescreen was to add the text labels, but with tooltips it doesn't seem necessary.  Having a consistent toolbar layout through all screens seems more usable than the way the icons are placed on the homescreen. 

I wanted to ask what you thought about moving the icons right away to a toolbar on the home screen?  The homescreen could just be the photo and the logo if we wanted to keep it active.  I'm not sure we even need it though.  If BlackBerry is anything like the iPhone, the app remembers the last page you were on when you left it so you don't always enter through the homescreen anyway.  Though that's my opinion based on what I found out in the guidelines, I'm curious what you think.

I took some other notes, there's a lot in there on interactions, especially how to design your app to accomodate both touch screens, trackpads, and different screen resolutions.  Most probably aren't relevent until development, but they were certainly interesting.  I was focusing on text, icon, and design related guildelines to begin.  Just in case your curious, there are simulators you can download.  The one that matches the resolution of our prototype in MockFlow is the BlackBerry Curve 9300.  BlackBerrys are backwards compatible, so all early versions work on the newest version.  There are screen resolutions charts in the design guidelines.

Oh and I'll probably re-design the logo along with creating the icons.  I have another idea in my mind, that other one was just thrown together.

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I think these were shared in a link early on, but I came across them again... here are the official design guidelines for BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone:

• BlackBerry
• Android
• iPhone

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For the presentation and future reference.

Prototype

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Interesting article:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/12/02/a-study-of-trends-in-mobile-design/

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via uxforthemasses.com

This probably would have been more useful at our last meeting, but I thought it was an interesting posting.

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via webdesignledger.com

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As I discussed yesterday I created a Workflow document describing the different sections of our app, you will probably have to create later on interactions between these sections but for now it seems to be a good start.

Please feel free to edit the documents as much as you want, even reword or delete I do not mind :)

Heidi, could you please add the document to the right-hand side of the blog?

The link is:

https://docs.google.com/drawings/edit?id=1i9JkL0nQofIeA_DvAcpDNFW6lPL9WzpOB80...

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• What's On
• Students' Union
• Events (currently only one)
• Kingston University
• http://www.kingston.ac.uk/aboutkingstonuniversity/events/
• Odeon (Movie Times)
• http://www.odeon.co.uk/fanatic/film_times/s102/Kingston/
• Rose Theatre
• http://www.rosetheatrekingston.org/
• Kingston Events
• http://www.kingston.gov.uk/whats_on
• Getting Around
• Bus
• Taxi
• Train
• Around Me (Map)
• Penrhyn Rd. Campus
• Kingston Hill Campus
• Roehampton Vale Campus
• Knight's Park Campus
• Kingston Town Centre
• Shopping, Markets
• Entertainment
• Food & Drink
• Nightline (London Helpline for University Students, optional)
• http://www.kusu.co.uk/content/446993/nightline/

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I've put together some draft personas based on our interviews which will hopefully soon appear in the documents list. Please go in and edit with anything I've missed. I tried to find images that are roughly like the people we spoke to! As a description for each, I've currently got 'first year student' and 'second year student' but we could probably find something a bit more imaginative here! There is a section on User goals which I've left blank for now. This is where we put what they would want to do with our app. We can fill this in at the next meeting maybe, though feel free to add any suggestions to the document now.

Also, one of the interesting points to come out of the interviews was that the Students' Union seems to have a fairly low profile and the students we spoke to didn't know much about what it offers. Their website gives more information (http://kusu.co.uk/), some of which might be useful to add to our app.

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They are .wma files, not sure how or if I can put them in the sidebar yet, but I'm going to try this out first.  I think the sound quality was actually pretty decent for this little recorder.

WS119552.WMA Listen on Posterous

WS119553.WMA Listen on Posterous

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I found this great presentation which explains what personas are and how to design them: http://www.slideshare.net/MulderMedia/the-user-is-always-right-making-persona... The example persona on slide 4 is very similar to those we use at work. Please post up any other resources you find.

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I've attached a more detailed list of questions for tomorrow here based on the outline in my other post.I couldn't work out how to add it to the documents on the right unfortunately. I'll print off a few copies to bring tomorrow.

It's important to note that this isn't meant to be prescriptive at all i.e. we don't have to stick to a script. If something interesting and different comes up, we should feel free to ask more about that and if any questions occur to us on the day we should ask them.But it helps to have some question areas written down in the beginning!

See you tomorrow!

User_Research_Experience_Design_1_JH.doc Download this file

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I was working on a mockup of our app and would like to know what you think about it!

Kingston_Uni_Tour.pdf Download this file

Let me know if you want to make any modifications as soon as possible would be good so I can print it before leaving work :)

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I've started thinking of a list of content.  There's a lot of examples on the kingston.gov.uk site to get us started, and I discovered a couple of interesting Kingston specific things we've talked about that we might be able to use in our app.

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Here are my suggestions for how we approach the target audience research on Thursday morning:

• I'm hoping we can leave the lecture about 11 to go to do the interviewing. I'm not sure what is scheduled from 11 onwards but hopefully its something we can catch up on at a later date. I should be able to stay until about 1 but have to go to work in the afternoon, unfortunately!
• I think the student canteen is a good place to conduct the interviews as it should be full of students at leisure!
• It's probably easiest if the 3 of us conduct the interviews together - 1 person can be the main interviewer, the other 2 should take notes (although we can all jump in and ask questions as they occcur to us). We can record the interviews for future reference (I know my phone does this) but we should take plenty of notes just in case this doesn't work.
• I think that around 15-20 minutes should be enough time for an interview. We don't want to keep people too long.
• Often you pay people a small incentive payment for taking part in research, but I think given that we are interviewing students on campus this won't be necessary. We might consider offering to buy people a coffee if we struggle to get anyone willing to help!
• From an ethical point of view, we need to make it clear to potential participants that any information they give us will be treated confidentially and we will only be recording the interview for analysis purposes.
• I am going to post a topic guide with some question areas, but a rough outline is:
• 
  
  •  
    1. Introduction - who we are, what the purpose of this research is
    2. About you - what year of study is the respondent in, what subject are they studying, do they live in Kingston
    3. Starting out at Kingston Uni - when they first started, what was their experience like, how did they get to know their way around the university, what problems did they encounter
    4.  Mobile phone usage - what type of mobile do they have and what do they use it for, do they access the web from their mobile, do they use apps (NB: only about half those in our survey did), favourite apps,
    5. Our concept - explain general purpose and show screen shots of how it might look
    6. Feedback on concept - could you see yourself using this when you first started at uni, what do you like & dislike about the idea, is there anything similar to this available, how could we improve it

Concept

We definitely need to show people some rough mockups to demonstrate what our app might look like. For example, I created this very basic one in Balsamiq for the home screen. I'm sure it will look better than this, but even a few basic screens will help people give feedback on the idea...

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FoursquareReview.pdf Download this file

Mine has a lot of screenshots so I saved it as a PDF.  I'll probably clean it up and save it again at some point, but I wanted to get it up here for review.

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