This week we had a critique for the Smartwatch Project. I knew going into the critique that my smartwatch UI was nowhere near perfect and needed a lot of work so I was looking forward to getting others feedback and thoughts on how I could improve it.
After the critique I had quite a few changes to made as I got lots of good suggestions for how to improve my smartwatch UI which is just what I needed. I felt leading up to the critique I had hit a bit of a wall when trying to work out the layout so it was refreshing to get others ideas on how I could improve. The general feedback was changing up the structure of my UI in order to make it less cramped, to look at the detail and language I use and ensure it is child friendly and to look at making my typography bigger and the character smaller on the screen
I drew a quick sketch on my iPad to show how I wanted to implement this feedback and change my design:
Applying this feedback I tweaked my designs to include more white space, fix the text sizing with assistance of the type scale and just make my designs look overall a bit better. The design might look extremely simplistic but when prototyped the UI really pulls together and gets the message through to diabetic children that blood sugar level tracking really important because it is a life threatening illness so anything too busy may be too distracting for them. The final design is 100% the same as the sketch I drew after the critique of the structure I wanted to implement but after playing around with the spacing and layout, I felt there was a slightly neater and better way to display the content.
<aside> 💠Reflection
I overall really enjoyed this project despite the few challenges I faced. I am really proud that I was able to push myself to create illustrations for this UI which I was happy to use and implement into my final app design and really added to the fun, playful feel of the user interface. Also despite not being very happy with the outcome of my app when I was presenting it at the critique due to it looking quite cramped, the language choice not being quite right and not how I wanted it to look, I’m happy that I was able to get the relevant feedback that helped me further refine it and the final product is a simplistic but fun and effective UI which I really like.
If I was to create this again, I would definitely look at expanding it out to there being a parents smartwatch UI too so parents could monitor their children’s blood sugar levels or even an adult version of HYPO which uses more adult language and looks at helping diabetes and obesity through high sugar levels in adults.
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