Next up was my critique for my smart watch app. Since we only had one week to make these screens we were not expected to have completely finished products, even though I was happy enough with mine before the critique, I was excited to see what my lecturer thought of it and what he suggested to improve it. Overall he was very pleased with my designs and did’t have much to critique. The only real change would be on the ‘Add device’ screen, where he suggested to move the text and icons to the centre vertically, to make them more even. Overall I am very pleased with my designs, and I had confidence going into the critique and was happy with how it went. It was also very helpful to learn from other peoples designs in my class, seeing what they were doing, and the start, stop, and continue sticky notes that we were posting. I also got some feedback from my peers which was useful, and someone suggested a great idea to add a feature which allows the user to turn off all devices at once, for example if they were going to bed. This is definitely something that I am going to look into adding. Below is my add new device screen with the improvements made, and I think that although it isn’t a major change it is definitely an improvement.
Before Critique
After Critique
In class we then done a workshop called ‘Sailboat’, where we had to write down on Miro what our goals are for the new project, barriers for our goals, and what will drive us toward for the goals. It was interesting to think of the problems, opportunities, barriers with autonomous vehicles. It was also cool to see what other people were thinking and the different approaches that they took with this workshop.
We then sorted out the sticky notes that were put down into different categories to try and get some sort of system going. From this exercise we were able to see that people generally thought that autonomous vehicles aren’t very safe and that was a major barrier. Apart from safety the other barriers that come with autonomous vehicles are ethical, because it could put a lot of taxi and Uber drivers out of jobs, and this is definitely something to consider. The goals of this project was to provide a product that was safe, and also one that had an accessible UX & UI for people who physically can’t drive because of various reasons.
In todays class we had our smart watch app critique and we also completed a sailboat exercise. I really enjoyed the sailboat exercise as it was a practical and fun way to gather research and thoughts on autonomous vehicles. Using the sailboat template, we were able to collect this data in a way that will be useful moving forward with the new project. We thought about what the goal of the product is, what helps us sail towards it, and what barriers we could come across.