beardFIX© – the app and website

What a busy Summer it has been! Our app is on target to be released on the Apple App Store this coming December. We are super excited to see the app finally coming together at last!

We have spent the past couple of months getting our teeth into ionic, angular and firebase and we have an app at last that is 95% fully functioning from end to end. It will be ready for user testing at the end of the week.

Once our user testing starts so can the fun part – the UI design that will fully bring to life our UX desires. We have just secured some real estate online at www.beardfixapp.com – please pop over for a quick visit. At the moment we have only a landing page to whet your appetitie but there’s loads more going on in the background in the meantime so stay tuned for more updates. It is a mobile first design so if you’re out and about your mobile device will ready it without any problems.

We are super super busy at the moment so it may be a while before I update this blog again. Keep an eye out on www.beardfixapp.com for more news and follow us on our more regularly updated instagram account here.

Ciao for now 🙂

Scheduling Summer Success

The summer has rolled around super fast this year, I cannot believe that we are almost at the end of June already! A whirlwind trip to Australia at Easter for my best mate’s wedding was soon forgotten as I arrived back home to a backlog of college assignments and demanding work hours at my part time job to pay the bills. It was a case of head down, bum up and a few weeks of frantic time management and workload juggling. As soon as all of our Summer assignments were complete, we pushed froward to create a functioning MVP (minimum viable product) of our beard app which we completed last week. Still very much a work in progress, it is not fit for public consumption yet but watch this space!

In the midst of such frenetic activity, our summer results were released for the 2017 semester. I was delighted to receive a strong grade (75%) in my UI Design module for my design proposal detailing our app interface aesthetics and functionality.  You can check out my final design on Invision here:  https://invis.io/AJBOUUSPE

Rejuvenated by my strong grades for the semester and I am again energised and renewed to  push forward with our work over the Summer so that we may create the beard-care app within our capabilities. Onwards and upwards peeps!

Version 6.1 is here!

Version 6.1 for the iOS has been put together at last . I have done a whole series of UI revisions, some of which include a camera shutter button and radial menu layout to encourage more user engagement and discovery.  

The location of assets and buttons are designed to optimise the F-shaped reading pattern of most users and the major navigation tools are located within the green and  amber zones  of the  ‘Easy Thumb Reach’ diagram, shown below

 

Above:   Home Screen,  F-Shaped Scanning Pattern & ‘Easy Thumb Reach’ Diagram

The app low diagram is shown below to provide a visualised flow path of how a user navigates through the interface to access the product reviews, photo diary and grooming articles with the app.

You can check out the prototype UI on Invision here: https://invis.io/AJBOUUSPE

Above:   Application Flow Diagram

 

Prototype V6.0

We are on Version 6 of our prototype testing already! The feedback so far is giving us fantastic direction and navigational insights. Already drafting V7.1 as I type this (V7 has just been done in Flinto which we are moving away from in favour of Invision App). Two gifs of V6.0 is shown below with an android interface but V7.1 will be an iOS interface as further to development tools and supports open to us, our team have decided to focus solely on an iOS app for release late next year. Loads to do yet so back to the drawing board as it were!

Link to V6.0 on Invision here: https://invis.io/2NBE7OXQ4

        

Grange Mobile App

College and working life have been very demanding of late so I’ve been pretty bad at updating this blog. Expect a series of updates in the coming days!

I am delighted to say that I finally got the opportunity to build my first app, albeit a basic framework, in jQuery last month. The design brief centred around a DIT student use case that focused on accessing a personal timetable and the ability to edit module settings. The jQuery model allows for these functions and nothing else – most of the buttons are dead links with the potential for further development had the brief and time constraints allowed.

Check out my code on github here: https://github.com/brendanfeeney/grangeMobile

The App UI

Male Survey

Please help us! If there are any males out there with 3 minutes to spare, please click HERE to take our short survey to help us shape the features of our upcoming app. Please share with your friends. Thank you 

#app #male#skincare #grooming

 

My Design in Print!

As a member of the committee organising Gloria’s 21st Gala Dinner, I was thrilled to be asked to do the illustration work for the social media and print campaigns promoting the event to date. We have put loads of images up on facebook, twitter and instagram, but to see my work in print has been the biggest delight of all. I just had to share it here to mark the occasion. As much as I love the digital sphere, you just can’t beat the look and feel of a physical paper artefact in your hands. Bliss. And a little bit of pride too.

Prototyping

We’ve begun building our first prototypes for testing! It’s very exciting. Hoping to test users this week for feedback on app name, navigation mechanics and basic colour responses to the app. That last one is gonna be tricky to quantify.

We’ve just put together our first prototypes on Invision as we want to do some AB testing right away. All feedback and comments welcome on this blog too. Join in everyone.

Prototype 1 can be found here: https://invis.io/NXAIF3O3D

Prototype 2 can be found here: https://invis.io/7KAJFD7CX

Storyboard Workshop

We had a fantastic tête–à–tête in class last Friday with everyone grouping together in threes to brainstorm storyboards for aspects on how our apps could function. We mined so much good information out of that 2 hours session that we will definitively be pursuing that method of idea generation again. It was so good. There were post-its and markers all over the place. Even our humour got the best of us and a thoughtless joke spawned the name for our app – ‘Filthy’. We are focusing on the male hygiene domain right now and hope to produce an app that focuses on facial care and grooming for a male audience.

We have spidergrams coming out of our ears right now as to where this app could go in terms of functionality and UI but for now at least, feast your ideas on some of our scribbles from our ideas session.

Pitch 1: The beginnings of an idea

The masters project idea pitches have began in earnest yesterday. We learned loads taking in all the varied ideas and concepts that our classmates put forward as the beginnings of an app or game for their masters proposal.

As a member of ‘Brendana’; the twosome team of Dana and I, we put forward an idea for a facial care app that would document and simplify the skin care and grooming processes for end users. We presented a short 3 minute presentation on our idea and got a lot of helpful feedback from our tutors on the scope of this early idea.

We are now actively exploring ways to narrow our scope and find our target audience to begin more focused user testing. We have already started testing the storyboard sketches we presented yesterday.

Smiles all round as it’s full steam ahead for now. Here’s a copy of the full presentation we showed at yesterday’s sprints:

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