Design Sketches
What are design sketches?
Design sketches are the first part of the UI/UX design process. They allow the designers to explore, suggest, question, and propose different ideas without being bound to those ideas. They also allow the designer to explore alternative solutions. Typically design sketches are more about exploring the design than focusing on usability. Key points that distinguish a sketch are muting less important details, omitting unimportant details, and highlighting the important elements.
Why we created our sketches?
We created our sketches as a way to explore and compare different design options in order to get started on the UI/UX design process.
How we achieved our design sketches?
We achieved our design sketches by setting aside time to sit down and sketch the most important pages of the application, remembering to include alternative solutions to the same page so that we don't tunnel on one design decision.
Home Page
This is the original sketch of the home page. The home page consists of the water calendar and the tasks designated for that day. The tasks will include the time to when a plant should be watered and what time a plant needs to be moved out of the sun, just as some plants are sensitive to the amount of sunlight it receives. These tasks will help the user maintain and care for the plants to grow to its fullest potential. The bottom shows or navigation bar that allows the user to direct to the current plants they have in their collection, searching a plant by name or camera, the Q&A section that allows the user to ask questions to other users, and lastly the user profile settings.
Find Plants Page
This is a sketch of the search page for our mobile application. We created this page to allow users to search for a plant to add to their collection or learn more about. There is a search bar and camera option feature that users can choose from to search for a plant. The camera option would be especially helpful if users do not know the name of a plant. Each square in the main frame will be a picture of a plant along with a short description. The search icon on the bottom navigation bar is also shaded to be darker so that users know they are on the search page. This is the first step of the UX design process.
Forum Page
This is a sketch of the forum page for our mobile application. This page was created with the intent to allow users post questions, updates, and responses to other users posts. There are four different tabs that allow the user to see the featured topics (these would be the most frequently visited topics), my posts (these would all the posts the user has made), saved (these are all the posts the user has saved by pressing the heart icon on any other post), and search (which would allow the user to search for any post using keyword phrases). These different tabs would display the main post and any response posts underneath in which the user has the option to either collapse or expand either post by pressing on it. The bottom panel represents the main pages of the application and is consistent component between the sketches. The circle with the explanation mark resembles the users profile and a potential notification system. We created this page to help foster a community between the application members in which they would feel comfortable giving updates and asking questions. This would also help streamline communication and outreach for the nursery owners (secondary persona) by allowing them to more easily contact customers and vice versa. This relates to our Hifi prototype of the forum page by outlining the basic structure that would be reused for the Hifi version. We ended up replacing the user profile with a heading that greets the user for a more personal touch and removed the search option because there was already a search option added to the bottom panel.