At the time of this project’s release, the concern over COVID-19 had rapidly intensified and taken an effect over our daily routine and thought.
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I remember feeling worried because access to basic materials like masks and hand sanitizer suddenly felt beyond reach (sold out/surged prices), but going outside was unavoidable because all delivery services for grocery shopping were filled for weeks.

The “I wish we could have ____ to make this better” thoughts encouraged me to choose COVID-19 as my topic for this project so that I could explore one in its entirety and create a solution that could help the community.

The objective of this app is to be a beneficial addition for the community. With this in mind, I felt that it would be helpful to conduct a SWOT analysis on this app to identify the potential strengths and weaknesses within different functioning components as well as how it will exist alongside existing apps.

After reviewing the main functions that are necessary for the app to fulfill its intended purpose, I identified what components must be included on the interface to carry them out.

Designing the first draft of the interface was mainly an experimentation of combining layouts/processes of existing apps to curate a product that people would be able to intuitively engage with. Because this app requires elements of communication and searching through items, analyzing the flow of existing apps that do this particularly well was necessary to understand what expectations a user already has for how this app ought to function.

For example, in the “Your Groups” feature, I incorporated similar text hierarchy and visual placement of features from Apple Messages to create an interface that people are familiar with to reduce the time needed to figure out how to use it. That way this app can be intuitive and understandable while also being a new tool a user has not been exposed to before.
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These designs were refined through a series of three major critiques from the peers in my class. Suggestions and comments were made on both the functionality of the app as well as the visibility and placement of text/features.

This project was interesting for me because it was the first time that I came up with an idea for an app and implemented it to the level of prototyping. I learned quickly that the components that I identified that were necessary for the app was just a fraction of the logistics I had to sort out. Simple features like “cancel” to get a user out of the middle of a process were just as important to consider in order to account for all possibilities of user actions.I also learned how valuable getting feedback from others was from this project. Just being able to see my classmates interact with my prototype and noting their response time to certain features was extremely helpful in figuring out what areas were not quite clear yet. The more intuitive my application is, the more time my user has to engage with the features of the app, hopefully fulfilling their needs. Reducing cognitive load definitely stood out in this project as an important process to undergo during the iterations of the app.
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