My first assignment for Des200, consisting of planning out and then prototyping three distinct design prototypes, did not go according to plan. Due to various time-management failings on my behalf, the final products I handed in were considerably more simplistic and rushed than I had originally planned.
One of the most notable rushed aspects of my project is the initial Miro planning boards. During the very start of my design process, I vastly underestimated how long these would take to complete, and as such began to push them back in favor of working on projects for other classes. By the time I finally began to work on my Miro boards, I was already behind in the other exercises. As such, my Miro boards were created in roughly three hours, with the intention that I would return to them after completing the rest of my project. This never happened. In the future, I will not underestimate the importance of using an iterative design process, and will make sure to spend enough time on my design sprints at the very start of a project. This is an aspect that I considered to be the least successful.
The UI/UX exercise is what I spent the most amount of time on, and as such, this exercise is what I consider to be the most successful part of my project. I found Flicko to be incredibly fun to use, so much so that whenever I would get stuck on another exercise, I would return to Flicko to work on my app. I believe my app’s layout is simple enough for kids to navigate through successfully, with it’s large buttons, and intentionally minimal word count, all being aspects that I consider to be well designed.
I had a lot of trouble with my 3D design exercise. My initial idea was to completely redesign a product, which eventually proved to be too much work in the time I had. As such, I had to completely scrap this exercise and start over, wasting many hours of progress. As such, my final poster, inspired by the minimalist VW ads of the early 1960’s, does not contain many promotional elements (e.g. price, location to purchase etc.) as I had little time to work them in. I also found Rhino quite a challenging software to use, in contrast to the relative ease I had when starting with Blender.
For my VR environments exercise, I created a room inspired by my time spent as a child in Northland. While incredibly simple, I believe that the atmosphere created by both the large sunset picture and the various bird noises successfully immerses the user into the room.
If I was to ever re-do this assignment, I would have started work on it straight away, giving myself enough time to complete what I had originally planned. Realizing the importance of planning out projects before starting them, is my biggest takeaway from this experience