– The menu bar has moved.
– Hourglass has been removed and replaced with representative circles.
– A set up page has been added.
– Individual flatmate page layout has been moderated.
– Generally, I have just improved the aesthetics of my application.
I have decided I would like to make a mockumentary. I have recently watched Trekkies and King of Kong, and would like to make something similar but on a smaller scale of course.
Overall, I like how the visuals of my interface turned out. I enjoyed learning the basics of Flash and look forward to learning how to do more impressive animations. I would have liked to make the liquid in the hourglass spin around with the animation. I think that my interface is clear and logical, and shows important information relevant to my user group.
Two changes that I would have liked to have implemented but were very last minute thoughts, as your job as a designer is never finished right?, are 1) Include the time and a calendar or simply ’10:00 AM, FRIDAY 30 SEPTEMBER’. And 2) A set-up page, where users can change the colour settings, add new flatmates, and a previous months history button for filing purposes.
I learned a lot about power usage in this project and have made a conscious effort to reduce my own power at home. I found it beneficial to work out an individual’s power usage, as I had never really thought about this before. It is interesting to see how quickly power can add up, and which appliances cost more than others to run. For example, I thought that the washing machine was quite an expensive appliance to run, but in the scheme of things it is not that bad. I also did not realise how expensive a 10 minute shower can be, and how that can add up over a month period. The discoveries I have made on this project are the results I would like users of my interface to get as well.
Thank goodness for online Flash tutorials. I have never used Flash before but now can comfortably make motion tweens, frame-by-frame animation and buttons.
Fortunately, I am an example of my user group:
– student/young professional
– flatting
I also live with seven others in this user group and in the ‘fairly splitting the bills dilemma’ so I was able to test my interface with my user group continuously as I was working on it. Some changes that they recommended were:
– Colour changes
– To remove the appliance name and just have the time and cost as they icon was clear enough
– To re-design the hourglass so it doesn’t look so flat
– To create a square around either ‘Day’, ‘Week’ or ‘Month’ so it was obvious what page you were on
– At first I did not have the overall cost on the individual name pages, but after communicating with my flatmates there was a general consensous that although they liked the icons and they were helpful, at the end of the day they wanted to know how much they were spending on utilities and that this information should not be hard to find.
– They enjoyed the drip animation, and the surprise element of the hourglass turning – an interesting interaction.
Research:
Development:
taylor112 