Studio Brief 02 - Design for Screen - Development & Feedback

To start the design process for the production side of the brief I started by looking at how the website will be used through sitemaps, a sitemap will help me figure out how many pages there will be in the site and how someone can navigate through the site. 

The sitemap was very useful part of the design process as it helped me to visualise the different parts of the site that I will need to wireframe and then design. The wireframes that I have now created are the basic (key elements) that need to be on the site, rather than adding all the content it allowed me to play with placement and positioning of certain parts of the page. By annotating it as well it can help me understand what parts of the site need to move and what parts needs to stay.  

Building on the basic wireframes that I created which brought the first visuals of the site into life, I started by taking those and adding content into the boxes so that I would understand how much space was available and whether it worked all together. As the site does not exists previous to my idea it is difficult to visualise what the site will look like, so I am using the basis of the PayPal site to help me understand how the site should be used, I am also doing this because the site is going to be in partnership with the company and if it was to be completely different it would look out of place.  

Feedback - 

For the this crit I asked a couple of questions that I thought might help me make improvements to the idea. Without doing this it would be very difficult to get the best possible outcome of the idea. 

1. Are there any areas that I have not considered that people may benefit from? 

• Collaboration with companies such as NUS and 16-25 rail cards, to make it more approachable for the target audience.
• Give weekly timetables and information on how much they have left to spend
• Have ways to see facts and figures (you have saved this much so you can afford ... milestones?) 
• Editable and personalise

2. Website over app - my thinking is website will easier to engage with over an app

• An app due to the increasing popularity of contactless payments, an app will always be accessible to the user, a website might only be visited once a day. Also take advantage of pop up notifications on mobile devices. 
• An app will defiantly appeal more towards your target audience.
• An app can be used on the go
• Both would be beneficial but for your target audience an app would probably be used more regularly.
• Maybe both? Because this is kind of personal and might want to keep track of money on the go? But it id not very convenient to use a website, because apps can give notifications but websites are easier to manage with the bigger screen.   

3. Linking to PayPal do you think I should follow a similar branding and make it a sub site of PayPal or should it be a new site but with a partnership with the brand? 

• Different but with partnership - It will allow you to be a lot more flexible when addressing your target audience, while maintaining this collaboration. 
• Different - idea is unique and has a more specific target audience so make it stand out for what it is.  

The feedback that I received has really helped me to identify the advantages and disadvantages of my user interface. Some of the feedback is more useful than others but it has answered some questions that I could not figure out by working alone. The next stage from here is to take my wire frames from paper and start putting them to life on the screen. I will be doing this in time for when Only (design agency) come to help give some feedback on out ideas, this will be beneficial as they have real industry experience and they know what will work and what wont work in the user interface world.