Brief

 

To explore UX and UI principles, understand how they work together and interrelate.  Practice UX and UI design in the creation of a basic mobile application.  

 

Tutor

 

This brief was created and overseen by Bill Strohacker, owner and tutor of Strohacker Design School and previous editor of Smash Hits magazine.

 

Concept & Development

 

My designs were inspired by a yoga studio in the French Alps, ‘Emily Ruth Yoga’. The company already had a website, but as of yet, no mobile application. 

 

As an established company, this exercise needed to leverage and build out from the existing brand, look and feel. It was important for any member of the Emily Ruth Yoga community to instantly be able to recognise the brand, and  navigate the app with a sense of familiarity and ease. 

 

The Emily Ruth Yoga community consists of regular locals in the Alps, but also visiting tourists looking to fit in some yogic practice to their holiday. The app design needed to be intuitive to both. 

 

I started my development with understanding the user journeys...  putting myself in the shoes of the customer and constantly questioning...  Where is the customer? How and what do they know about  Emily Ruth Yoga? Have they interacted with the company before? What are they doing when they use the app?  Why are they using the app? How are they feeling?... All this helped build up a picture of the user and their experience. 

 

From these explorations and insights, I created sketches and wireframes of the user journey,  evolving and iterating into a higher fidelity prototype using Figma. 

 

This was a great and fun exercise to play with UX and UI design approaches. If I was developing this concept further though I would certainly be working with the company and their customers to do user testing on the wireframes and high fidelity designs - understanding how users ACTUALLY use the designs and interact with the UIs would give me further insight into the user’s experience and enable iteration into a seamless and enjoyable to use app. 

 

For the purposes of this exercise I designed the app solely in English.  Evolving the app’s UX / UI to be available in French would be an interesting exercise - unfortunately, it's not just a simple task of merely translating the app, cultural and tone-of-voice considerations would need to be explored too.