Project Overview
Project deliverables
User interface
My role
UI/UX design
Visual design
Wireframing/prototyping
Project context
College + Amazon Creative Jam with Adobe
Timeframe: 3 days
Team: Tejus Krishnan, Jennette Kachmar, Colby Tong
Tools used: Figma, Adobe XD
Background
This project was for the latest of Adobe’s “Creative Jam” events, where participants are given a short timeframe (anywhere from 48 hours to a week) to design a deliverable according to a prompt co-authored by the company sponsoring the event. Think of a hackathon that stops at the UI.
Amazon was the company that Adobe partnered with for this latest Creative Jam, and our prompt was to design a tablet-based platform for high schoolers to discover the field of design. Our specification broke down as follows:
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Comparative analysis + ideation
While there is a surfeit of apps, websites and online communities dedicated to design and UX at large, Amazon’s prompt poses the unique task of combining an educational approach to discovering design (which largely exists on “pure-information” outlets like blogs, podcasts and talks) with the interactive, gamified nature of an app (whereas most design-related apps and networks cater to experienced practitioners, whether it be actual software like Sketch and Figma, or project-sharing communities like Dribbble and Behance).
Realizing this, the first step we took as a team was to assemble a list of widely-used products that answer to these separate categories of user needs (learning design vs. exploring design) so we could combine their most effective attributes into a product that falls into both camps.
Additionally, we looked at apps in non-design spaces that successfully achieve the twin goals of educating users on an unfamiliar discipline while also enabling them to explore that discipline in practice. A prime example of this paradigm is a meditation app like Waking Up, which introduces its users to a practice with which most people are unfamiliar or inexperienced, but provides ways to engage with it further as they gain more experience with it (such as audio lessons on the philosophical concepts surrounding meditation, as well as interviews and additional courses from renowned meditation teachers). A major goal that emerged for our app based on this research was to make its content rediscoverable.
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Design Process
Wireframing + prototyping
Based on our ideation and background research, we experimented on paper with navigation schemes for our app that would provide infinite content for users while also providing a sense of linear progression in educating them about design.
We decided to segregate the app’s user experience into two components, one more practice-based and the other more exploration-based. The “practice” component of the app feeds users simple UI exercises (modeled after existing resources like the Daily UI challenge) that can completed using an in-app editor. The goal of this feature is to give our users the opportunity to immediately get their hands dirty with the experience of building UI components.
The “exploration” component, on the other hand, is for users to engage more broadly with the field of design and develop a necessary context and vocabulary for their own practice. One way users can effectively accomplish this goal is to see the work of their peers, so we designed a sharing feature within the app for users to post their completed UI exercises. Additionally, the app will provide a feed of design-related content from the Internet, such as blogs, interviews, podcasts and tutorials, so users can collect the insights of industry professionals and academics to sharpen their understanding of design through trusted sources.
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Visual design + brand identity
We named our app “Design Dojo” to honor the inspiration we took from meditation apps in designing our product’s user experience. This theme informed the rest of the app’s brand and aesthetic choices, which included a ninja mascot and a soft, muted color palette accented with bold, warm tones like red and orange. Since the app is naturally content-heavy, we strove to make the navigation and page layout as simplistic as possible to preserve users’ mental effort on engaging with the app’s content itself.