Week 10: Challenge Activity - Rapid Ideation

For the second Rapid Ideation challenge activity of this module, we have been asked to create an artefact that solves a problem in our daily lives. I carried out a mind map exercise to quickly generate ideas that came to mind.

My original thought was to create an app that allowed you to make an inventory of food that you had in your cupboard and fridge. I wanted to include features where you could find recipe suggestions based on items you already had, with the ability to link up to your online food shopping account to add any other items needed. I also wanted to have a feature that allowed geographically localised users to swap ingredients.

I was a little bit behind with my blog at this point, and unfortunately I attended our study pod and realised a very similar artefact had been created by my peers. This was fine, and luckily I was in a position where I could go back to the drawing board (or mind map) and look for other ideas I could work with.

In the end I decided to create an app called Good Boy, that gamifyed training exercises and videos for new puppy owners. This was very topical for me as I had recently become the parent to a little puppy. I did some research around the topic and found other apps and websites that gave advice or had links to videos, but I really wanted to create a game out of this.

The basic idea for this app is that after creating a profile, you can view videos that are appropriate to your puppy’s breed and age. Good Boy Points are awarded when videos are viewed. You can also set alerts that give you reminders for feed times, play times and cuddle times. You can see a progress bar each dat (much like the Activity app on the Apple Watch) - which encourages the user to hit the daily goals.

I spent a few years living in Germany and whilst we were given language classes every morning, I found the studying to be quite dry. Duolingo is an app that also uses a gamification approach to learning, and I found this to be incredibly useful, entertaining and effective.

I created a low fidelity wireframe for this app to get an idea of what pages I wanted this app to have, and also to determine the user journey/navigation through the app. I wanted to keep the design quite simple as I wanted to use this second RI take to become familiar with Adobe XD, as I had used Figma for my previous rapid ideation challenge.

I actually found Adobe XD to be fairly straightforward once I had spent some time watching some online tutorials, though I am by no means an expert still.

I created some pages for the app, and decided to explore making transitions through the app as I wanted to push myself a little further on this challenge.

Overall, I was quite pleased with the progress I made with this challenge, however on reflection I would have benefitted from better time management. As I mentioned before, I was already entering this challenge a little later than others and the prospect of using unfamiliar software was a little bit daunting.

I would like to assign some time in-between modules one and two to carry out some more online tutorials, and practice both Figma and Adobe XD. This will give me more confidence in my abilities and avoid the focus shifting from other areas of the Rapid Ideation and Prototyping work.

If you would like to take a look at this app, then you can see it here. I’d love to hear your thoughts.