Mobile

The task given to us was to design, develop and present a mobile app. We only had a short timescale to do this so it was challenge for us to quickly move through the process. The app could be based on anything we wanted.
I went through a lot of ideas to think of the app that I wanted to create. We only had a week to build the app

For developing mobile apps we have used an online tool called Appfurnace, which allows you to easily make and deploy mobile applications. It works by you dragging elements such as buttons, pictures and videos onto the app page. You can develop more complicated features by adding your own JavaScript code. It also uses the PhoneGap API, which I found to be quite complicated, but I enjoyed looking into the things it could could do like accessing the phones camera and files.
Once the app has been made you can easily get it onto any smartphone by scanning the QR code, which makes it super easy to run and test it.

The AppFurnace interface

Brainstorming app ideas

Here you can see the screens for the menu and the letter pages. I made the menu so it would fit onto any size of device screen and tried to keep everything as simple as I could. I used simple left and right buttons so the user can flick easily between the letters instead of going back to the menu each time. I used very bright colours for each page so the app would be fun and visually appealing.
The biggest problem I faced was repeating the design 26 times for each letter. I made the decision to concentrate on the first couple of letters, which allowed me to add more features to these letters than a few to all of the letters. For example, I would not have been able to add the extra features if I had spent the time adding images to every single letter.

The menu and letter screens

I decided that I wanted to create an app that teaches the alphabet. I chose this idea as it would be simple so I should be able to complete a fully working version in a week. Also, this idea presents an interesting design challenge designing for children. I would have to base my graphic and interaction design around this.

I learned alot during this part of the module. We had to present our app idea and the product after it was build so this gave practise standing up infront of the class which is something that I am not particurlarly comfortable with.

I wish that I had made an app that took advantage of the unique capabilities of mobile phones as the device such as locative services or scanning QR codes. I would also have liked to make a more playful and unusual app but the good thing is that AppFurnace makes it very easy to do these things and I can go on AppFurnace and make any app ideas that I have in the future.

The video (right) shows my app in motion. The video shows a feature that I added which randomises the image shown from three options. This means that there is sometimes a different image shown so the app has much more content and depth. You can also see the play button on each page which plays a sound for the letter. The sound was one I downloaded for free and was not very good quality but it allowed me to show that it was possible to add sound and say I would get better quality audio if the app was actually made.
I consider the randomiser and the sound extra features that were not necessary for the app to work but it was good that I added them. I wrote these two features in Javascript code, which you can see (below).