I spent a huge amount of time in the makerspace on campus while I was in school, and thus, when I first heard about Glowforge, I was instantly curious, though it was always out of my price range. Fast forward a few years, and Glowforge came to my attention again. While exploring the forums, I saw multiple requests for them to optimize the web app to work on a mobile device.
This seemed like a great design challenge, so using this problem as my basis, I decided to do a case study to test my design process, and to create some high-quality visual deliverables. I limited myself to doing all the research/work in a 5 day period, and worked solely in Sketch.
All iconography/imagery were built by me in Sketch, and imagery was sourced from CC0 sites/the Glowforge website.
View the project in full-size here.
Enjoy!
"Your goal is to create a new design language for a new mobile operating system. Not iOS, Android or Windows, but something entirely new. You and your team will use, iterate and adapt this design language over the course of the quarter to design 17 core apps. All of your apps should look and feel like they are part of the same family"
Our first two weeks of work constituted extensive and careful analysis of where the current leaders, Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, were strong, where they were weak, and how we could fuel our vision to find a unique path to create something entirely new and different.
Although our team stressed having a quick feedback cycle, and all design choices were reviewed and approved by all team mates, the following work/images construe solely of my own personal design work. To see the project in it's entirety and the other design work done by teammates, please visit our InVision Board.
It's a Friday night and you and your friends are visiting Seattle for the weekend. Interested in going out for drinks, you wish you had a way to figure out where the hot spots are for tonight without having to visit each bar in person. SOMA will tell you where the crowd currently is and where it's headed for the night.
For my engineering Capstone project, my team and I designed and produced a high-fidelity prototype of our idea SOMA, or the Social Mapping Project. SOMA allows you to quickly visualize social density to make decisions on nightlife plans. find suggestions on places to go based on mood and venue details, and revisit favorite spots and access their current information.
Click here to view an interactive prototype, or visit www.meetsoma.com for more information and to explore our design process.
When our team began the capstone process, we recognized that we were not looking to solve a problem, but to improve a common human experience. Our goal is to redesign the nightlife experience for young adults. Through the SOMA application, we hope to help people discover the best places to be, anytime, anywhere, through social density mapping. As young adults ourselves, we have often struggled with deciding where to go out for the night, whether we are in Seattle, or exploring a new city. Crowded venues can be desirable to some who enjoy meeting new people and exploring popular places, but they can be undesirable to others who would prefer to find a quieter place while also avoiding lines. SOMA recognizes both types of nightlife enthusiasts, and hopes to serve as a decision-making tool for each group.
With a design idea firmly in place at the beginning of the quarter, we began our work with competitor research. Our team identified market gaps in current applications and were able to finalize and agree upon the aspects of SOMA that would set it apart from competitors: general populus, anonymity, and location history. From there we moved onto sketching and storyboarding, wireframing, and low-fidelity prototyping. We then conducted user testing and used our results to finalize design and develop a working high-fidelity prototype.
Our final product redesigns the nightlife decision-making process by providing three key features. The first is a map view that allows users to quickly see population densities at nightlife venues. Percent occupancy and color allow for rapid interpretation and decision making. Our second feature is an explore page that gives venue suggestions based on the user’s mood and venue details. Third, we included a favorites page so SOMA users can quickly access and revisit favorite spots. Bringing these three features together we created an efficient and fun decision making tool for nightlife goers of all types.
HouseMe was developed as part of a class project exploring what it means to develop an idea from nothing up until the point of high-fidelity mock-ups.
HouseMe is a mobile application and web portal for finding temporary roommates and housing tailored specifically to interns, recent grads, and new hires looking to connect with others in similar situations as themselves. With HouseMe, you can look for other interns or new hires within your organization to find roommates, or purposefully seek those working with other companies to expand your social groups and build new networks.
View the interactive prototype here.
WHAT: A 10 week engagement with the Amazon Video Game team analyzing their social media efficacy.
WHY: For our Spring Project with Montlake Consulting, we were tasked with creating a social media "playbook" to help aid Amazon drive engagement among followers and fans alike. My role in this project was two-fold, first by writing Python programs to automatically pull Facebook and Twitter data for analysis and testing. The secondary and final role I had was the assimilation of all our work into a single, unified presentation format. All of the design work, color schemes, formatting, layout, typography and presentation was created by me over a 2 week period. Shown here are a few of our slides from our final presentation. The final presentation can be downloaded here.
TIME: 10 weeks
ROLE: Lead Programmer, Lead Designer
SKILL REQUIREMENTS: Python, Facebook API, Twitter API, Graphic Design, Document Design
WHAT: A usability assessment of the Washington State Parks campsite reservation process
WHY: Partnered with Kayce Rodriguez, the Reservations Manager for Washington State Parks, to perform a usability assessment to help them with their RFP's to vendors for a new site/experience
TIME: ~6 weeks
KEY PROCESSES: Heuristic analysis, user interviews, surveys, usability testing (Morae), affinity diagramming, recommendation
View the full report here!
WHAT: iQuiz is a fully functional iOS application coded over a 3 week period in Swift. It’s a multiple choice Q-and-A game that allows users can choose from a collection of quizzes, where each quiz has a number (1-to-many) of questions, and users progress through each question one at a time. Quizzes are pulled from an online server and stored to local storage.
WHY: This was the first project built in my INFO 498, Swift class.
TIME: 3 weeks
WHERE: https://github.com/ianmpal/iQuiz_Pt1
SKILL REQUIREMENTS: Swift
WHAT: Perfect Pitch is an iOS app designed to help you perfect your pitch and singing abilities. Songs are downloaded from an online server, and then can either be played in a note-by-note fashion where the player has to hit each note before moving on, or played continuously, and then is given a score at the end for how many notes they hit. Scores can be shared via Twitter, and high scores are stored locally.
WHY: I designed and developed Perfect Pitch along with 4 other teammates as our final project for our Swift class.
TIME: 3 weeks
WHERE: https://github.com/rednebmas/PerfectPitch
SKILL REQUIREMENTS: Swift, UX/UI
