Kickin’ it off
The kick-off of this course begins with an introduction to our first project— De/Re-construct. Furthering our knowledge during the recent GUI course, this project aims to help us analyze and “deconstruct” an existing GUI, identifying design patterns of the interface, then create and test a modest redesign by “reconstructing” and using alternative patterns.
Starting with process of deconstruction, I began from investigating the apps on my phone, searching around to see if there are applications with specific functions that are confusing, difficult to register intuitively, or simply poorly designed. That being said, phone apps nowadays have gone through plenty of iterations and update that most apps are nearly perfect functionality-wise other than the occasional bugs. I definitely had a hard time finding an app that I had major issues with. I thought of apps that are present for one sole function— but take multiple clicks until you get to the point, such as the Notes app on Apple iOS, where you start with a “map” page, which guides you to another page when you select “notes” (this was split this way after the integration of iCloud), and then finally the note-taking icon pops up for you to take notes— which was probably your sole reason for starting up Notes-app. School applications such as KronoX— where many use for checking the time and location of your upcoming lecture, is problematic and takes way too many clicks to get to your schedule in addition to the poorly-designed main page interface.
In the end, I settled with the app called Weather Live. Weather Live is a slightly more “advanced” weather app compared to the pre-installed iOS”Weather” app on iPhone and other Apple’s devices. It is a beautifully designed app with real-time weather condition background images. It offers relatively detailed data for daily, hourly, and 7-day forecasts, but what makes this app stand out is the highly customizable display. You can choose from four different layouts, each providing simple or complex details. You can also set which data is displayed in which order for each layout. So, if you live somewhere with a lot of rainfall, you may want the precipitation parameter on top. If you like to watch the sunset, put that time higher up in your layout. Plus, every morning, you’ll get a daily report notification with the current condition and its relativity to yesterday’s weather.
The main issue I’m having as I use this app is that as the main GUI is opened up- I always end up having a hard time finding and accessing the page where you can see the weather conditions in other cities and adding/removing new cities and their weather in your saved places. The app makes it simple to look through the few cities’ weather conditions that you’ve already saved in your display— by scrolling left and right, however, that could be troublesome when you would like to quickly access— for example— Sydney, Australia, not being sure that you have it saved, you would have to scroll through your list first, and when you discover that you don’t have the city saved, you would have to add it in your saved list of cities, which, in my opinion, is difficult to find and pull up.
As a student living in a city but studying in another, having friends and family on all over the world, traveling at least twice in half a year, and having a hometown in a different continent on the other side of the globe, I try to access the page where you can add/remove cities, quickly check weather conditions of the place you’re traveling to in two days, taking a look at the conditions in your hometown you know is being hit by a tropical rainstorm, etcetera. Take a look at how I interact with the app— keep in mind that this is simply a reenactment of my usual interaction with the app when I make the mistake of not knowing/remembering how to pull up the “Places” page, therefore, it’s not a genuine interaction.
I will break the app down further in terms of what specific issues I’m experimenting with finding the “Places” page in the next journal entry, you can read it here.
Journal with me! 