Digital Prototype
Below is a screen recording of a quick click through of my prototype. It shows the basic navigation, which can be categorized into three sections: home page, build message page, and results page.
To view the prototype yourself, visit the link here. Please excuse the white space at the bottom of the simulation phone screen, the android template on Invision is simply different than the android template I used in Illustrator. Upon realizing this, I did not find it worth my time to stretch each of my mockups I had already designed. However, in Android Studio this will be a non-issue since everything will be in a constraint layout.
Logic & Algorithms
As mentioned above, my app has three main sections. (Home, build message, and results). Each of these main sections will be its own fragment, which will make the “build message” section more smooth to populate. The home page will be a recyclerView containing each of the five message templates. I plan to manage my data from WordsAPI with a repository class and a data class. Thankfully, I don’t need to worry about data persistence since there is little reason a user would need to save a generated message for long periods of time.
Content for App
The dynamic content will be fetched from WordsAPI, as the user enters text into the prompt boxes. Specifically, for the adjective, emotion and adverb boxes I will be getting synonyms from WordsAPI to spice up their message a little bit. I will not be changing the boxes with “personal detail” as the prompt, since that would not make sense in terms of formulating a text message response.
My five questions and answers are as follows:
Q: How are you?
A: Pretty adjective, things are just adjective. I’m a little bummed about personal detail today though. But one highlight is personal detail, which is cool! Should be adjective. How about you? How did personal detail go the other day? Seemed like it was going to be adjective.
Q: What are you doing today?
A: I’ll probably verb for a while, then take some time to verb my plural nouns. I’ve been meaning to verb for a few days now but haven’t done it yet. Adverb, my schedule has been pretty adjective so I’m just doing my best.
Q: How are you staying sane & practicing self care?
A: I’ve been doing a lot of verb which makes me feel adjective. My goal is to be better at activity by the time this is over. But honestly I really just like to verb to relax. It makes me feel adjective.
Q: Did you see the news today?
A: Yes / no, I was verb-ing when I decided to verb the news. I honestly am emotion . At this point I try and verb the news because it makes me feel emotion whenever I read them.
Q: What’s new?
A: My biggest update since you last asked is personal detail. Not a whole lot is changing, just sticking to my adjective daily routine. How about you? Anything adverb adjective happen since we last chatted?
Asset Design
My app icon is shown at the top of this milestone, the plain purple background with the light teal paper airplane. The loading screen for Reply All will look very similar to the app icon, just in the middle of the screen. Below are my loading screen and my current background image on one of my mockup screens.
For Reply All, this is the color scheme I’ll be sticking to. Purple: #5E3562, Orange: #F1915A, Light Teal: #DDE9E0, and Dark Teal:59BEB7. I wanted to go for something simple yet fun, like life in quarantine should be and how I hope Reply All makes users’ texting experience more simple and fun. However, these colors are subject to change since I’m very indecisive and could decide overnight that they’re hideous.
Slightly unfortunately, I’ve picked a very text-heavy app so there shouldn’t be too many image assets. I say this is unfortunate because I’m finding it to be limiting my UI design to be sort of ugly. So, I’ll be brainstorming ways to improve that. One option I’m considering is to design simple icons for each of the “madlib” fragments. Another is to keep my dichromatic styling, but make more visually interesting patterns for the blocks / boxes instead of the solid coloring. I look forward to playing around with this, but I know that getting the app architecture solidified will take up the bulk of my time so I will focus on being nit-picky with UI design after getting the first phase done.
Main Items for Feedback:
I’m mostly just concerned with having strong app architecture from the start so I set myself for success, so I’d love any feedback about what I have set up in that regard. Also, I want the front end to look appealing as well, so any feedback about my graphic design would be appreciated.
Anyone Elsa? 