Case Study:

Prime Mobile App
Mobile Interface Design

A habit-busting mobile app designed to help you refine your time.

This project is a 2021 Pele Silver Award Winner.

Introduction

For this assignment, I was tasked to create and design a fictitious mobile app. When I thought of what sort of app I’d find useful, I initially leaned towards apps to help with productivity and time management. However, many apps of that sort already existed so I sought to do something different.

Instead, Prime is an app to help users manage their leisure time. It addresses a problem I’m all too familiar with: time lost to bad habits. I’ve tried like others to use my calendar, set timers, or create alarms to create productive leisure time, but the experience often turns resentful when the dreaded alarms go off and I’ve failed to do better with my time.

View the Prototype

Services

  • UI / UX Design
  • Branding
  • Copywriting

Software

  • Adobe XD
  • Illustrator

Conceptual Planning

The goal Prime’s UX/UI design was to create a rewarding experience around leisure-time-assistance to encourage users to keep using the app as a way to responsibly break their bad habits.

My challenge as a designer was to create design patterns that communicated concisely to streamline the user's experience. Easily accessible information and features are paramount details of the app to limit the amount of users that turn away from it in order to find a more imemdiately rewarding service on their phones.

Laying out “Your Menu”

Design Patterns

The crux of Prime is the user’s ability to frequently view and edit their “Menu.” In conceptual planning, I explored various design patterns of the main interface that featured the Menu and sometimes a suggestion drawn from the Menu. I wanted to find a way to have users easily navigate to different sections of their menu and get recommendations for their day quickly.

Quick & Easy Comprehension

Considering the User Experience

The main interface featuring “Your Menu” uses a scroll-up design pattern that allows the user to scroll up to see the rest of their menu items and a horizontal-scrolling-tab-group that lets users peruse categories of their menu with ease. The main interface also offers suggestions from the user's menu for a direct route to start an activity and log their time. Users can easily get more reccomendations by swiping—a gesture that is natural to most phone-users today.

The Design

Prime’s branding was offers a color palette with many gradient possibilities. Gradients could be bright with analogous hues or feel subtle but interesting with gentle complementary hues. The typography of Prime features a monospace sans-serif for headlines, a serifed font for meta-data, and a sans-serif for body copy. Patterns and animations in the UI are inspired by intervals of time.

HiFi Prototypes

Drag Left to Right

Your Menu

The Main Interface for easy perusing

  • Intuitive Left-to-Right Swipe-able Reccomendations
  • Scroll-Up List with horizontal tab-group

Activity Log

To keep track of your time and generate improved reccomendations

  • Ability to add Notes
  • Tips for mindful leisure time

Menu Item Entry

To fully customize Your Menu of activities

  • Easily categorize items
  • Customizable descriptons to get you moving
  • Access to The Prime Guide for best practices

Personalized Notifications

Suggestions throughout the day to keep you on task

  • Non-intrusive reminders attuned to your phone usage
  • Reccomends activities based off user-data

Home Screen Widget

A handy tool that sits right on your homescreen

  • Generates suggestions based of the time of day and user-data
  • Provides an easy path to Your Menu

In Conclusion

Habits are a topic of interest to me because of my desire to redefine my habits. So when this Mobile App project was assigned to me in class, the idea of an app that rewards braking bat habits felt like a natural direction to go in. I check my phone hourly and learned that that 66% of other Americans do the same (sometimes up to 160 times per day). Thus, I chose to design a free-time-aid that would live on a smart phone.

The challenges I overcame helped me improve my

  • User-Experience Design
  • User-Interface Design
  • Targeted Copy-writing
  • Adobe XD Skills

and helped me think with a new perspective on how I spend my own leisure time.

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