More coming soon -- this is ongoing work!
When I joined the team, I realized how challenging surfacing abstract concepts and new experiences in the form of a user interface was. No one really had thought about mobile browing as more than just a pile of tabs, and it has been rewarding work trying to formulate these new mental models into an understandable, clean UI. As we phase to launch our first release in mid-March of 2017, I plan tighten up some of my interaction and visual work on Iota.
I performed a competitive audit on two types of competitors: 1) mobile browsers, 2) content managers that grouped items. To help my team understand what would be good design patterns to follow in our application, I put together a slideshow with screenshots and notes.
This process of presenting and commenting helped streamline our team's expectations and also aligned with what visual style we wanted to aim for.
Below details my design process for creating search tasks. A user first invokes a search, then is able to add similar or related searches to create a task group. I first created low-fidelity mockups to understand how nesting would look on a screen, and one of my main challenges was to have 3 layers of nested information.
Once I understood how I could possible nest the information, I iterated on both list and card layouts to visualize what would be more effective for a user to perceive groups, which drove the ultimate decision to go with card groups.
More to come, including search results pages, branding, desktop viewing, and a launch page.
Due to the fast-paced nature of the project, I decided to create a concept map to help the team make decisions as to what features they wanted to prioritize. I held a collaborative concept mapping session with 4 others on the team and created visuals for the team to reference.
