Eva Garcia

As a designer I think it is our job to keep up to date with design news. A product designer at League, Andrea Croft states, “I’m thinking a lot about the challenges we have as creators of technology to really think deeply about the behaviours we’re creating.” She goes on to talk about Instagram and how it focuses on keeping users on their application; something which has eventually caused some individuals to develop mental health issues. I think that it is important for us to bear such negative outcomes in mind when designing, so that we can evolve and create better experiences for our users so that we can impact them positively. This is why I wanted to create Notice for my final year project so that I can make it easier for designers to keep up to date with design news.

Notice

Notice is a desktop application that will help all types of designers to carry out research, find inspiration and keep up to date with all the latest design news.

As a designer working on a project, finding inspiration and keeping up to date with design news/ technology can be difficult. We are faced with many challenges such as strict deadlines and a lot of information which is usually not well organised. I know myself first-hand how messy working on a project can become, especially when numerous tabs are open at the same time.

Notice is one place that will allow designers to tailor a profile according to their design needs e.g. their job, design interests and topics they like to keep up to date with. Notice will provide designers with the ability to search valuable articles and resources they may need. They will be able to discover new tools and find inspiration from endless design feeds.

The Process

As mentioned above the vision of Notice is to help designers stay organised and keep up to date with design news so that they can continue to evolve and create good experiences.

The main challenge I had with this was trying to think of features / experiences that I could create for Notice so that the users would get the best possible value from it. To meet this challenge, I conducted a survey and asked designers for suggestions on how to improve their experience when carrying out research / keeping up to date with design news. I also made a note of questions while carrying out my customer research, so that I could later compile them into sections that would help me decide which features to include.

I then compared the results from my survey and the questions and eventually narrowed down the feature list to content feeds, categorisation, show reading times, saving system, updates and reminders, documentation and having a single source of truth.

Once had got my features list done I started using Sketch to flesh out my low and high fidelity wireframes.

I used Invision to create all my prototypes for Notice. I pulled all my artboards over from Sketch to Invision and created hotspots.

The Outcome

I am really proud of Notice and all the work that I have put in to get it to where it is. There have been frustrating moments along the way and times when I questioned what I was doing but it has all paid off. I have created something that I feel is important for me as a designer and at the same time the information that I have gathered from other designers through my survey, has proved to me that this application is something I think people will use and benefit from.

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