After we developed the user stories, we sketched out the screens of our application. Each one of us sketched as many design ideas as we could come up with to implement our user stories, and then shared our sketches with each other. The general idea was that we wanted to give users data on areas have good lighting, which areas are busier, and which areas have recently had reported crime. We would use this data to help the app give the safest navigation directions from point A to B for our users. It’s important to emphasize that these features were to implement the user stories that we developed after interviewing our end users – this way, we had a solid basis on why we chose these features in particular. But this was only the sketch phase, where we illustrated very rough concept ideas, where the plan would be to show these to users and then use user feedback to improve and develop clearer versions of the app design later.
After sharing and discussing all of our sketch ideas, we filtered and sorted the sketches on which ideas were more or less promising as the best implementations for the stories we developed. This would set the stage for our first set of prototypes for our app to help locals be safer while walking around Seattle University.
Our sketches can be seen below.
Jonathan’s Sketches
Rakan’s Sketches
Maggie’s sketches
Ryder’s Sketches
SafeOwls 