Evaluation

 Evaluation

When it comes to the project itself it is satisfying looking back at the first drafts of the idea I had in August/September and seeing how much it evolved and grew over time as more and more time has been spent on it. I remember that the name itself took me a couple of minutes to come up with as it just strike me as the right one at the moment.

 

However, now focusing on the work I have achieved it is varying from the app itself to printed promotional materials to a video promotional material and hopefully custom tins and t-shirts that I would use for the Degree show itself. When it comes to making an app the choice for building the app was to make it in Adobe XD this is because due to previous experience, I have had with it. However, if I were to do this project again, I would probably do it in Figma as it has some features that Adobe XD doesn’t have. 

For the printed promotional materials, I have used a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to create the posters. Whereas for the video I have used Premiere Pro and After Effects.

At first, I have started to design the app wireframes within an Illustrator to have an idea of the colour scheme and how the app would roughly look like then I have started to implement the finished material onto the Adobe XD to see it in action.

Throughout the project, I had to make decisions some smaller and some more substantial to the app itself. In the opening phases of designing my bottom bar was taking up too much space whereby I decided to remove the bars around it. As well as throughout the icons for the app were changing. And deciding that adding text underneath each icon would be helpful as I have to assume that various demographic would use the app with various levels of technological knowledge.

 

To make the app/company stand out I have decided to implement a feature called “Build your coffee” where the customer can select from the type of the beans, the region of the beans, amount of water, type of milk, and amount of it. Thus, giving the customer full control of creating a coffee in his unique way. Also, I acknowledge that not everyone might be a coffee connoisseur thus, I have included a research functionality where the user can find out along the way what is the difference between the light roast and dark roast and what are the characteristics of each region of the coffee and many more.

However, during the creation process, I have decided to not include the reviews feature within the menu section of the app. As there might not be a way to verify whether or not the review is legitimate as well as some people might post bad reviews just for the sake of it.

 

Furthermore, throughout the project I have been acting upon the feedback I have received from Stephen and Michael to further improve the app. Where one of his suggestions from Michael was to change the flags within “build your coffee” screens as they do not fit within the app. At first, I had in mind to change it to the images of the coffee plantations from various countries however I quickly noticed that there is a limited number of images of them and also all of them looked similar to each other without a characteristic that would differentiate each other. Thus, I changed it to a map of the country of where the coffee is coming from. Giving customers awareness of the city and region of the coffee bean.

 

Some of the problems I have encountered throughout the project were when making the promotional video one of the shots is using the tracking shot where the phone is shown and within the phone, the footage of the app is played within. Problem was that I had to play around with After Effects and Mocha in order to remind myself how to use the software as we have previously learnt it with Kristaps.

Another thing that has caused me trouble learning how the auto-animate feature works within Adobe XD this is because sometimes the object would animate and sometimes not. Thus, I decided to look into Adobe documentation of the feature on their website and found out that the object has to be exactly the same in order for the auto-animate to work properly.

 

Conclusion

Overall, I am pleased with how the project has turned out, and even in some places I have exceeded my expectations with what I have achieved. The following project has helped me grasp the basics of UI/UX and further expanded my Adobe XD/Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop knowledge.