Today we had a critique session for our autonomous vehicles. Critiques are a great chance to get feedback from our lecturer as well as our peers, and they are also a great chance to give feedback to others.
From the critique I got given a few improvements that I could make to improve, and these were changes that would overall improve the user experience. There was an issue with the home page, that when the overlays came onto the screen they blocked other UI elements when they popped up on the screen. This made it confusing to click onto other buttons as they were being covered and there wasn’t a clear back button or anything. What I decided then to do to make the overlay in the middle of the screen, as well as dropping the opacity in the background. This made it clearer to the user to tap off the overlay to make it go away.
Before Critique
After Critique
Another critique was on the car performance page, and the feedback I received suggested that the colour of the background should change depending on what mode the car is in, for example, if it is in sports mode then it is red, or eco mode it is green. This was something that I had thought about but now that my lecturer also mentioned it I think that I will definitely add in. This took a lot of work in prototyping so it was quite challenging to make t work with the background colours changing depending on what mode it is in. Once I got it changed it definitely was a massive improvement to the overall UI and added an extra level to it. Below is one of the new screens which shows how the background changes depending on what car mode is selected, and this one is for ‘comfort’.
After Critique
The last critique point was to make some sort of onboarding experience that will get the user to set their destination and start their journey, which is something that I hadn’t thought about. Currently I only had a splash screen that went straight into the journey, but after the critique I wanted to try and create a bit of an onboarding experience for the user so I created a screen where the user could enter their name, email, phone number, and destination. This screen was super simple as it was just for the user to enter some details and setting a destination. I grouped the personal information together and then used spacing to separate the box where the user would choose their destination.
Todays critique was super helpful as my lecturer was able to point out some things that I wouldn’t have seen. This really showed me the importance of getting other peoples opinions on your designs as you can learn so much from the feedback of others. I really benefited from todays class and the feedback that I received and I think that the changes that were recommended really improved and enhanced the UI.