Background

Program: ArtCenter at Night (ArtCenter College of Design—Pasadena, CA)
Course: The Art of UI

Course Description:
”The Art of UI is designed for those interested in creating user interface art for mobile apps, focusing on 2D art, illustration and graphic design. This introductory course provides a unique approach to app design, utilizing traditional design principles combined with conceptual design and illustrative techniques, allowing you to explore the creation of your ideas from rough pencil sketches to finished interactive mockups. Class involves research, coming up with an idea, wire-framing an experience, and visual development techniques. You will create a light prototype in InVision App using a collection of Photoshop or Illustrator screens as proof of concept, rather than a functioning app. This course will give you greater insight into the mobile gaming and internet industries, user interface and experience design (UI/UX) and is intended to help you understand the principles and techniques necessary to approach app design under the high pressure of a production setting.”

Process Book (PDF)

DESIGN BRIEF

Students were tasked with designing an app of our choosing from start to finish through initial research, brainstorming sessions, competitive analysis, user personas, prototyping, user interviews, and branding.

EXPERIENCE Overview

Everyday music festivals and concerts are becoming increasingly popular around the world. Even though festival goers find making time to go see their favorite performers on stage a daunting task, a problem often overlooked is actually locating their friends and loved ones at these events.

Almost everyone at the festival is equipped with a smartphone but such events seldom have any signal, making these devices useless when trying to contact each other. They do have “WIFI towers” spread throughout the festival grounds but you have to be in relative close proximity to use them. To make matters worse, these festivals tend to sell out, greatly increasing the number of people attending. The Coachella Music and Arts Festival alone sells out it’s max capacity of 99,000 per day each weekend. This massive amount of people in large crowds combined with poor cell reception makes it virtually impossible to find or make contact with your friends once inside the venue.

Aside from their smartphones, the one device every attendee has when they enter a music festivals is their ticket. Nowadays, the ticket comes in the form of a RFID enabled wristband. These wristbands can carry lots of data, including who the wristband is registered to and credit card information enabling festival goers to pay for food, drinks or other souvenirs by simply scanning their wrists.

MISSION OBJECTIVE

WAYWARD aims to combine the technologies of the festival wristband and Bluetooth trackers into one, allowing attendees to track each other through their wristbands without the need of cellphone signal. If friends are out of range from one another, a similar form of tracking as “Community Find” will be utilized. Imagine the accuracy and effectiveness of the location finder if thousands of users are using WAYWARD in a single location. As a bonus, WAYWARD also allows users to chat with friends, plan meet-ups, view the festival’s line-up, create their agenda and even preview music, becoming an all encompassing festival app, bypassing the need to switch between multiple apps.